Laurie Colwin’s Family Business is about the complications brought about by family connections. We exist within the family structure, playing roles assigned to us way back when by siblings and parents and the newer roles we took on when becoming a wife, then a mother, and maybe an aunt. Expectations are made of us and to a certain extent we write our own expectations of what family will bring us, what life has in store for us as we play our roles within the family, nuclear and extended. The private realm — the individual’s needs — can get lost in the whole public (family) scheme of how life should proceed.
For the distraught, overwrought, and overburdened Polly of the Solo-Miller family, her life seems ordered and perfect; she has everything she ever wanted and expected. True, her parents are uptight and controlling, her husband works constantly, her one brother is a stiff and her other brother is a permanent adolescent. At least her kids seem pretty loving and fun. Polly cooks two dinners every night, kids first, hubby later, and serves them without complaint. When hubby works really late she has a tray with drinks and snacks waiting; when he arrives home in time for cocktails, she’s waiting with cocktails. When she wants sex, she has to ask for it quite insistently and then hubby is arduous and good to her.
Polly does work, three days a week for the Board of Ed but she doesn’t need the money. We never really find out why she works, although it does facilitate certain aspects of her life later. Polly has a housekeeper and dependable babysitters. She spends her summers in Maine and every single Sunday she has lunch with her parents, kids, husband, and whomever else from the family is around. She has no friends, just family. The family never fights, just gets frosty if things are tense, but all disappointment and disapproval is smoothed over, usually by Polly.
Okay, so this Polly is a little too much to be believed. Just go with it and the story gets better. Not more believable but better.
Polly’s world is rocked when the unexpected happens: she falls in love with a man who is not her husband. She begins an affair with him, seeing him at least four times a week and always for sex and cuddling and talking. Perfect Polly stops being perfect. She no longer meets every need of her family, she forgets evening engagements and vacation dates and refuses to change her schedule to accommodate family she always accommodated before. She really hits rock bottom when she has to go to a grocery story to do her shopping on a Sunday: good homemakers buy their food from the butcher and the baker and the Korean deli selling veggies and fruit, and never, ever do any shopping at a grocery store and never, ever on the weekend. Horrors! By the time I got to this part the novel I had to decide whether to lose all respect for myself as a wife or accept that this Polly was totally unreal. I went with the unreal and swallowed Polly’s guilt trip over grocery shopping. Then I just kept reading. I will not tell you how Polly works everything out for herself. I will just say that there is a bit of unreality there too; I don’t want to give too much away but I can tell you that Polly and her husband never yell at each other, and they never overeat or overdrink or overspend to let off stress. That just did not ring true to me.
Colwin uses this story to present her interpretation of the public/private dichotomy: the public is the family and the private is the single person in that family. We choose to live in the family and so we agree to live by certain public duties: love in the family is “intelligent and deep, and never unrequited. It was the basis of all good things and there was nothing secret or covert about it. Love flourished in the sunshine, in public, in ceremony and ritual.” Then there is the private, the single person. For Polly, this private love is “feckless, led to nothing, was productive of nothing, and didn’t do anyone a bit of good.“ But it does do her good to be loved by Lincoln; she finally sees that she is an individual and that he loves her “for herself alone“. Polly finally sees that she is a self, alone and single in her wants and needs. The single person determines who she wants to be friends with, what books she wants to read, what career she wants to pursue. The family will exert pressure on individual choices but the private side, as it develops and matures, will make allow Polly to make some choices herself.
Polly’s lover Lincoln lives only in the private realm: he craves solitariness, and lets no one else decide how his time or his life is spent. He loves Polly but is very satisfied with the limited periods of time they spend together. For Polly, she has never had a private realm: it has taken her years and now this affair to get her to the place where she can have her own friends, her own viewpoint, her own needs: “She felt some new self emerging….and she did not know what it would be like, but it would be idiosyncratically hers. Her family did not know the secrets of her innermost heart and there was no reason to tell them.”
Family Happiness is a great exploration of a very hard truth: there is family happiness and there is individual happiness, the public and the private realms of our heart, souls, and brains. We need both realms to be satisfied but we need to pay the price of both as well: we need not accept the roles our families assign to us but as part of the family, we do need to fulfill certain duties, and for the sacrifices such duties require, we reap beautiful and fulfilling rewards. But we also need to have our own selves, our own space, an acknowledgement that we are alone: the only one who really knows you is yourself. And to be satisfied with where life takes you (throws you, hurls you, tricks you and coaxes you), you must accommodate your private self. You can see it as the duties you owe to yourself. The sacrifices for such duty must be paid by you alone: Colwin makes this clear by never having Polly’s family suffer from her affair, just Polly herself.
Colwin did not intend her book to be a primer on conducting a love affair nor a guidance manual for being a good wife. Polly’s marriage and her affair are metaphors for the public and the private realms of our lives. We can find satisfaction in both but we have to pay the piper: “The pure feelings one had in adult life were complicated and mitigated, and they were dearly paid for, but worth everything they cost.”
Family Business does not end with all the ends neatly tied up. Life does not work that way and neither do any of Colwin’s wonderful novels. Polly has grown up in the course of the story. Midway through she is in despair because “[s]he did not know how she was going to stop loving Lincoln, and she did not see herself ever running off with him. Therefore she had condemned herself to a life of conflict and pain.” By the end, she realizes that life is conflict and pain. Living as an adult requires making decisions and all decisions will result in some degree of pain, sorrow, anger, resentment, or guilt. No, she’ll never be totally free and clear, after all she is a wife, mother, a sister, and a daughter, and she loves the people she is connected to. But she can take the pain and conflict as a cost of happiness, both her own and her family’s, and get on with living. She might even get used to grocery stores on Sundays.
