Highly Recommended
Debut novelist Claire Lombardo peeks over the gates of a rich Chicago family in this intimate, multi-generational, and wholly enveloping story.
Can anyone outside a family ever really get a sense of its dynamics? Claire Lombardo’s debut novel answers that question, arriving with a confident voice and a sense of epic familial drama that effortlessly weaves together decades of sibling rivalry into a singular narrative.
Lomardo explores the relationship between the “vast hormonal hellscape” of the four Sorensen sisters: the historically troubled eldest sister Wendy, the seemingly together Violet, oft-forgotten ‘middle child’ Liza, and the favoured youngest daughter Grace. Their own anxieties and issues are exacerbated by the impossibility of living up to the seeming perfection of their still madly in love parents, David and Marilyn, and their fancy Oak Park home in Chicago.
Lobbed like a hand grenade into this already fragile ecosystem is Jonah, the child that Violet gave up for adoption almost 16 years earlier. A possible act of aggression on the part of Wendy, she seeks out her sister’s estranged son and reunites them unprompted. It certainly shakes each of the family members out of their bubbles in turn, revealing cracks in the perfect facades they show to the world.
Using a character-first approach, where plot only exists to explore the characters a little further, Lombardo cuts back and forth between various eras of their lives including vignettes from David and Marilyn’s courting, the birth of their children, and other key points in the sisters’ lives. What’s fascinating about this approach is how Lomardo is able to sustain such an insular perspective for 500-plus pages: few other characters enter the frame, and it’s not often that we see what is happening outside this rarefied air.
It’s ostensibly set in and around Chicago. Yet apart from a few references to the Cubs or Marshall Fields, social events and the outside world are deep background. Which is interesting given that the bulk of Lombardo’s novel is set in 2016, the year the Cubs broke their 108 year drought and Donald Trump ran a successful presidential campaign. The real backdrop is the money: it’s defined the family by simply being the lens that they see the world through.
Rather than alienating the vast majority of readers who will never experience #richpeopleproblems, as the sisters drift away from the core, the novel unfolds around the pursuit of something more universally unattainable. As one person outside the family comments, they were “Trying to figure out my own life while bearing witness, every day, to such an idyllic marriage.”
Yet if anything is shown in THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD, it’s that no relationship is a perfect entity on the inside, at least not without work. Indeed, the title serves as a repeated meme between David and Marilyn that they would repeat “in times of strife.” Through births, deaths, marriages, lies, and confessions, Lombardo covers a fair few of those times in this intimate, engaging, and wholly enveloping story.
2019 | US | WRITER: Claire Lombardo | PUBLISHER: Doubleday Books (US) | LENGTH: 544 pages | RELEASE DATE: 25 June 2019
