Family Night

November 30, 1992
In her fiction debut, Flook, the author of two poetry collections, produces finely wrought sentences, but her story falls flat. Heroine Margaret has, as the title implies, a dark relationship with her family, a tangle of step-siblings and ex-spouses. She also has a boyfriend named Tracy, a member of Sex Anonymous who engages in various forms of sexual congress with Margaret in full view of her relatives and ultimately prods her into committing incest with her stepbrother Cam. At Tracy's instigation, Margaret, Cam and Tracy seek out Cam's father, whom Cam has never met and of whom Cam knows only that he was once a model for Arrow Collars. Flook's style is frequently arresting; describing a car speeding dangerously through lanes of traffic, she writes: ``It was a reverse wake, a terrible seam ripping upwards.'' But her version of the family romance--a catalogue of wayward deeds, odd sexual encounters, ugly secrets and uglier psychodramas--is more exhibitionistic than revelatory, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share her brittle characters' overwhelming interest in themselves.

December 15, 1992
The turbulence of Flook's first novel derives its impetus from a dysfunctional family unit of formidable proportions. Sex addiction, parental abandonment, divorce, and incest constitute elements in the confused equations of Margaret's relationships. The games begin when her lover Tracy's manipulations convince stepbrother Cam to hunt down his real father, who once modeled for Arrow shirt ads. A bold, erotic frenzy pervades the road trip from Rhode Island to Chicago, where sexual encounters seem to detonate an already explosive situation. Throughout, entanglements depict a jarring view of sexual urges gone awry. ((Reviewed Dec. 15, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)