Flesh and Blood, by Michael Cunningham (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

The so called nuclear family has become a fashionable theme in fiction, particularly in America, where the generation gap between…

The so called nuclear family has become a fashionable theme in fiction, particularly in America, where the generation gap between the values of thirty or forty years ago and those of today is perhaps most keenly felt. This novel begins in New Jersey in the 1950s, where a couple named Constantine and Mary Stassos raise a family of two girls and a boy with the usual expectations of that epoch. Of course, the children grow up with the values and mores of their own generation, not their parents, and their sexual and other doings are an ongoing source of self discovery, conflict and even disaster. The prose style is rather overheated, but the narrative sense and the emotional temperature are sustained with verve and conviction.