Family Night — Maria Flook

*Winner of the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation*
 
Family Night cracks open one American family and shows us the values -- and the dysfunctions -- that make up the gothic attractions within it.
 
At the center of this family stands a mysterious father figure, whom Margaret and her stepbrother, Cam, have never met: All they know is that he had been a model, the last Arrow Collar Man. Tracy, Margaret's lover, ever eager to enrich his encyclopedic awareness of fixations, cajoles Margaret and Cam into a trip to find this absent father. The Arrow Collar Man as missing patriarch.
 
Margaret, Cam, and Tracy -- themselves haunted by recent divorces, by their own children, by their undecided instincts -- set out in a powder blue Plymouth Duster on an unpredictable journey through the intimacies, obligations, and obsessions that bind us to each other. Family Night is an American family romance that neither Freud nor James Cain could have imagined.