All Adults Here

All Adults Here / Emma Straub
NY: Riverhead, c2020.
356 p.

This is a juicy, multigenerational novel that was told with skill and respect for all the characters, no matter how messed up their lives may be. They aren't too messed up, though; this is set in a smaller town where Astrid Strick witnesses a fatal accident with a school bus. The death of someone of her age, who she's known all her life, throws her into an examination of her own life. 

Astrid's three children each have their own issues; the eldest is struggling with the family business, the middle daughter is a modern hippie but is starting to want a child, and the youngest lives in the city and has just sent his teenage daughter to live with Astrid for a while after some trouble at school.

Each of these characters is explored, so we get a sense of their lives and their own experiences of the same family - which of course are all different. Personality, gender, birth order; these all play a role in the way they feel about their childhoods, roles in the family, and current lives.

It's told very naturally, and I didn't find that the changes in viewpoint were difficult or clunky. Instead, each one is given equal time and the characters are all well drawn, with nobody left out. This is a hard balance to achieve, and I think it worked very well here. The teenage granddaughter was a great character with some really interesting bits in her story, including her new friend from school who comes out as trans. It feels organic and not tacked on, and this friendship is very sweet. 

Astrid herself is questioning her whole life, and finally admits that her friendship with a local woman is really something more. She announces to the family to no big uproar, thankfully.

This book tries to cover a lot of current social issues; however, most of them felt pretty natural to modern life. I didn't think it read as if she was just trying to squish in every hot button possible - the inclusion of most of the events made sense in the story. There were a few loose ends not tied up the (slightly anticlimatic) ending, which I would have preferred to be more closely explained, and some of the elements of the story seem like they would have engendered a bit more of a reaction from the rest of the family. The tone of the book -- somehow utopian and gentle, despite the content -- doesn't really allow for strong upset or permanent alienation among this family. So while they are dysfunctional in a sense, the family remains functional as a family unit and all's well that ends well. 

But I enjoyed the reading of it, and definitely see as a book that a book club might get lots of traction from. The writing is solid and very readable, and the characters' decisions will give you lots to talk (argue?) about.