Dysfunction in Abundance
LYING WITH THE DEAD
By Michael Mewshaw
288 pp. Other Press $14.95
Reviewed by Jayne Pupek
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Leo Tolstoy)
Tolstoy’s words are from his renowned classic, Anna Karenina, but they certainly fit the dysfunctional family that is at the center of Michael Mewshaw’s eleventh novel,Lying with the Dead.
In Lying with the Dead, a manipulative and dying matriarch gathers her three adult children at their Maryland childhood home so she may confess her sins. The narrative rotates among the three voices of the siblings. Maury, the firstborn, who currently lives in California, is afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome and reveals that he spent twelve years in a maximum-security prison for murdering his father with a butcher knife while trying to protect his mother. Candy, who had polio as a child, is the dutiful daughter/martyr who stayed behind to take care of her gravely ill mother, forfeiting her own happiness and the man she loves.
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