What we have here is a family of four who each need a good
shaking. Isolated and with
a callous disregard for one another, they bleakly continue to breathe, but not
much else. Eve, the mother, is so
engulfed in the formulaic fiction that she writes and makes a good living from,
that she is intellectually, sexually and emotionally exhausted. She suspects she is a fraud, but makes no
attempt to connect with any of her family members, including her son who has
locked himself away in a bedroom, suicidal.
She doesn’t notice the state he is in.
Her husband Michael, an academic, thinks the boy should be reprimanded
for being somewhat impolite to a dinner guest, but otherwise, he could care
less about the child. Michael is
concerned that his career has not progressed further, blaming that on his
failure to secure a summer home in a more fashionable area, rather than on his
spectacular disregard of his university’s policy on predatory sexual
relationships between professors and students.
These parents have been so superficial in their child
rearing that their only value passed on to Astrid, Eve’s daughter, is that of
snobbery. These three are all
disappointed with the summer home that has been rented so that Eve can escape from
demands created from her newfound popularity.
But the house doesn’t live up to its advertisement, and Astrid seems to
feel this more keenly than the others.
She shrinks back from all of the furnishings, labelling them as ‘sub-standard’,
and worse: “Old people have licked the furniture with their dead tongues and
ingrained the banister all the way up the stairs with skin flakes off their old
hands.” She shuns the ‘oiks’ in the
local village, and lives through the lens of her camera. The boy, Magnus, is in the process of hanging
himself when he is interrupted by the fifth character, a mysterious woman who
has wandered into the house, uninvited.
Each adult assumes the other has invited her, and as communication
is poor… She is the catalyst that
explodes their lives. Is she amoral and sociapathic, or an angel with bare
and dirty feet? Using this book for literature
therapy won’t provide easy answers, but The
Accidental will make you think about the extent to which we should value
order, conformity and responsibility.
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