In 1935, Noël Coward included in his series of playlets, Tonight at 8.30, a jaunty, song-filled exposé, in Victorian dress, of fam- ily relationships, Family Album. Penelope Lively’s novel of the same title, her 16th, covers similar territory — without the jauntiness or predisposition to burst into song.
It is an apt title. Lively’s novel is an extended meditation on the meaning of family, the nature of blood relationship and our interconnectedness based on the accident of birth. In place of conventional plot, it proceeds by snapshots and vignettes, a series of portraits and first-person narratives, not so much a story as a sequence of word pictures held together like beads on a string by the flexible thread of the subjects’ kinship.
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