Under One Roof

Novels have long offered a forum for pondering the wonders and horrors of family life. Consider Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The Reeds, the centre of Arjun Basu’s new novel, are not entirely unhappy, but it wouldn’t be accurate to call them happy either. The family consists of Bobby and Mimi and their two adopted children, eighteen-year-old Abbie and sixteen-year-old Dee, who live at “the end point of the middle-class dream” in an Anglo suburb west of Montreal.

The novel begins with a day in Bobby’s life as a downtown business executive (“Vice President, Revenue & Procurement, Eastern North America,” to be precise). In the elevator ride up to his office, he transforms from a “Family Man” into the “kind of man with a trail of unflattering nicknames...