An all too familiar trope of contemporary fiction is the dysfunctional family. If you undertook a detailed survey of novels written over the last thirty years or so, this might be the single most prevalent theme of them all—you’re not a character worth your salt these days if Mom or Dad didn't scar your young psyche from the cradle, intrude malevolently on your adult life, or just disappear somewhere along the line. Tolstoy might have had war and adultery for his subjects, Austen had courtship and marriage, but in the fictions of Jonathan Lethem , Zadie Smith , Jonathan Franzen , Richard Russo , and so many other leading literary lights of the modern day, we don’t need Napoleon or zombies to wreak havoc, since our blood relations do such a fine job on their own.
Then along comes Tim Winton, who offers an intriguing twist on the whole matter. In his best known book Cloudstreet (1991), Winton somehow manages to deliver up the hopelessly and charmingly dysfunctional family. Or better yet, two dysfunctional families—the Pickleses and the Lambs—who share the same roof, and are peculiar and cursed enough for everyone in both clans to remain messed up for life. Somehow they come through with flying colors, albeit not with your clichéd cinematic happily-ever-after ending, but in a plausible, unadorned way that might very well resemble (horrors!) your own life.
Sam Pickles has inherited a sizeable, if somewhat ramshackle house on Cloud Street, but a clause in the will prevents him from reselling the property for twenty years. The covenant is probably a blessing—Pickles is an inveterate gambler, but not a lucky one, and would invariably squander away any money made on real estate. He frets about destiny, or what he prefers to call the "shifty shadow," which more often than not treats him and his family unkindly. On the morning he lost most of his hand in a boating mishap, Sam had an ominous feeling from the moment he got out of bed. After cogitating later on the sequence of events, he has come up with this bit of after-the-fact wisdom: he should have stayed in bed all day. Nor has Lady Luck repaid him in his more recent waking hours. She remains a fickle, sometimes cruel mistress—most notably during his frequent visits to the racetrack. Not that his inveterate bad fortune has stopped Sam from betting again and again.
Prevented from selling the Cloud Street property, he decides to make money by bringing in a tenant to share the large home. The Lambs, who soon take over half of the building, are almost as bedeviled by destiny as their landlords. Their son Samson, nicknamed Fish almost drowned in an accident that left him permanently brain-damaged. But the Lambs are God-fearing and industrious, and they manage to establish a small thriving market, which they operate out of the ground floor of the house.
An uneasy détente between the two clans seems destined to develop into outright feuding. Yet hostilities gradually give way to begrudging tolerance, and ultimately cooperation. Finally, a marriage between the families cements them together. Issues and what folks quaintly call "baggage" linger on. Quick Lamb, Fish’s brother, battles with guilt over his role in his sibling’s disability. Rose Pickles resents her father's irresponsibility and her mother's alcoholism. A subplot about a serial killer seems oddly out of place, almost as if he has stumbled into this book from another novel, but Winton eventually finds a way of allowing even this macabre interlude to advance the individual stories—and broaden the hearts and minds—of his cast of characters. But just as unexpected is a dose of the fantastic in this mostly realistic story. Winton offers a dose of the miraculous presided over by an Aboriginal spirit, and a haunting somewhat reminiscent of Toni Morrison's Beloved .
In a novel with so many tragic or horrific elements—death, disability, dismemberment, murder, not to mention any number of unseemly domestic issues—Winton is oddly disinterested in giving them much emotional resonance. The recurring theme of destiny, the "shifty shadow" of Sam Pickles’s musings, imparts an almost Attic sense of fatalism mixed with a celebration of dogged endurance. Yet ultimately this is a novel about coping, acceptance and forgiveness—sometimes that most difficult kind, self-forgiveness. Winton succeeds by presenting his cast of characters compassionately but honestly, telling his tale without falling into the sentimental clichés and predictable plot resolutions that most authors would fall back on in such a story.