Fingers crossed, with 10 stories remaining, “Family Sins” will be the last of a type of first-person story in The Collected. We have already encountered this type of story several times with “A School Story,” “Two More Gallants,” “The Day We Got Drunk on Cake,” and perhaps a couple of others. In short, we have the Nick Carraway-esque first-person camera narrator about whom we learn virtually nothing, who tells someone else’s story and discreetly exits stage right. This storytelling position is not always bad: in the case of The Great Gatsby, it allows F. Scott to wryly observe and comment on the rich from the corner of the party, a position one imagines he enjoyed. Crucially, it also ends with Carraway’s disgust with everything he’s seen—the destruction of Gatsby’s dreams parallels the destruction of Nick’s illusions that the rich are better than the rest of us and that gilded fantasy lands like West Egg are worth infiltrating.
The story’s set up: one summer, the recently graduated narrator visits his school friend Hubert for a few days at Hubert’s family’s estate in the Irish sticks. We get a great deal of back story about Hubert. He’s something of a legend at their boarding school; his parents died in a car crash with a truck carrying circus apes (the image of the accidentally freed apes cavorting over the corpses of Hubert’s parents is admittedly indelible); he was taken in by his paternal grandparents, who hated his drunken, con-man father and barmaid mother; the grandfather, Mr. Plunkett, a Guinness Ale manager, was very cruel to Hubert; and so on. In the interim, we follow our narrator as he meets the cook, Lily, from whom Hubert filches cigarettes and money, the stern Mrs. Plunkett who disapproves of Hubert in the style of her bedridden husband, and the narrator’s cousin Pamela who is staying with them for months and is seemingly in love with Hubert. (Hubert hates Pamela for being the child of his favored aunt, the good sister to his father’s bad son.) The narrator and Hubert go win money at the races, miss dinner, are disapproved of by Mrs. Plunkett, are forbidden from playing tennis. In the end, Hubert is mean to Pamela, and the embarrassed narrator leaves thinking how he won’t return: “A friendship had come to an end because when a little more time went by he would be ashamed, knowing I would not easily forget how he had made his cousin a casualty of the war with his grandfather. There would always be an awkwardness now, and the memory of Hubert at home.”
Who cares about “an awkwardness?” The loss of a friendship is a large thing that merits 20 pages, but it’s impossible to care about the narrator’s loss of Hubert’s friendship, as the narrator is a complete and total non-entity. What did losing this friendship mean to him? How did it impinge on his life, or not? It occurs to me that, in a way, “Family Sins” is the first-person version of “Virgins,” a story covered three weeks ago. They cover the same thematic material: an adolescent friendship is lost as one character visits the other’s large country manor. The difference in these stories is that “Virgins,” told in third, involves us in the girls’ psychological relationship, dramatizes the situation, and shows them in middle age, inviting us to wonder along with them what has been lost. “Family Sins” merely gives us the details of the house, the table setting, the landscape and tennis court and shoddy hotel bar. We have no idea what happens to either the narrator or Hubert (or poor Pamela). It amounts, more or less, to a kind of closely observed and finely written bit of nostalgia, with a few strange gothic touches.
The titular family sins are inaccessible to us because Hubert is inaccessible to us. The narrator is frankly completely unnecessary and simply takes the focus of the story away from the actual drama, which is between Hubert and his shy besotted cousin. All of the necessary dramatic elements are present to create a moving, perhaps even frightening story of the way generational feeling can imprison a person, just as old Mr. Plunkett is imprisoned in his room. But again, we only get a passing glimpse of this sad estate, as though viewed through the train window at which the narrator sits in the end, returning to his own invisible home.
