Family Circle

By M.M.

A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER by Thomas Keneally. 147 pages. Viking. $5.95.

One of the soundest laws of modern literature goes like this: novelists with the most damned consciences tend to write the most blessed prose. On the lengthy roster headed, of course, by James Joyce, Thomas Keneally supplies another case in point.

Like Joyce, Keneally once studied with a view to the priesthood. Joyce could not decide whether to define hell as Dublin or the nuclear family. Keneally agrees with Joyce about the family. His alternate hell seems to be his native Australia, and like Joyce again, he takes his hell both ways.

In A Dutiful Daughter, Keneally creates a presumably commonplace family--the Glovers--plunks them down on an isolated outback farm, and pronounces the scene his ninth circle. The story begins with deceptive ordinariness. At holidays, Damian Glover returns home from college to his older sister Barbara and the mysteriously ailing parents to whom she is devoting her life. Keneally's passions, however, are too intense for mere realism. Observing that "absolutely millions of people" are mad with "family pride," he concludes that "the only way for them to get humility is through learning they're--you know--beasts." Accordingly, like a Greek mythologist with the heart of a gloomy seminary student, Keneally makes original sin literal by turning Father and Mother Glover into bull and cow from the waist down.

This violent act of surrealism accomplished, Keneally continues as if nothing had happened. He has the special power of a poker-face comedian telling a gallows joke. Father and Mother Glover, for instance, spend their perfectly average evenings kneeling on all fours before the telly or pawing over a Reader's Digest.

Beside this terrible banality, Keneally's suggestion that family is another name for incest seems positively matter-of-fact. Further Keneally theories: an exceptional child is doomed to play Joan of Arc--martyr--to parents, who compulsively burn as witch that truthful spirit in the child that sees the beast in its elders and, worse, announces it. "Parents, for all their preaching and threats, turn out to be the children," the remarkable Barbara observes. This freedom to speculate, Keneally may be saying, is the only freedom.

How does a martyr escape from family, from original sin, even from Australia? Like Joyce & Co., Keneally is better at seeing the trap than seeing a way out. "We're cemented, you, me, them," Barbara cries. In the end, Keneally looses a Jehovah-like flood on the outback and the Glovers, washing himself clean of his creation. But in the meantime, writing like an angel, he has forcefully raised an ancient question: What is the demon in man that so often makes him a monster to those condemned to love him--including himself?

qed M.M.

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