A Family Failing by Honor Arundel

First published: 1972

Type of work: Domestic realism

Themes: Family, jobs and work, coming-of-age, gender roles, emotions, and social issues

Time of work: The 1970’s

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Edinburgh, Scotland; Lerwick, on the Shetland coast

Principal Characters:

• Joanna Douglas, a sensitive, intelligent young writer, who desperately wants her family to stay together
• Jonathan Douglas, her father, a journalist whose sudden unemployment changes his outlook on life
• Elsbeth Douglas, her mother, a cheerful, eager woman whose unexpected success as a game show panelist strains family relationships
• Mark Douglas, Joanna’s brother, a sensible yet strongly idealistic young man, who drops out of college to join a commune

The Story

The Douglas family is close-knit, accustomed to warm evening conversations in the company of one another. Jonathan and Elsbeth Douglas are journalists, so their children, Joanna and Mark, have grown up around books, writers, and lively discussion. Joanna is an aspiring writer; her father, to whom she is especially close, praises and encourages her efforts. Mark, a philosophy student, has inherited his father’s social conscience and enjoys debating issues with him. Both children thrive on their family’s closeness, although Joanna is more emotionally dependent on its warmth than is Mark, who often prefers the solitude of his room.

Elsbeth, their mother, is a good-natured and unassuming woman who teases her family for its intellectual tastes and acknowledges that the women’s pages she edits for a local paper are strictly popular entertainment. She is an example of the contemporary working woman, hurriedly finishing household chores each evening after she returns home. She and Jonathan enjoy a witty exchange and appear to have a strong, secure relationship. Jonathan, at times the old-fashioned patriarch (he prefers that Elsbeth or Joanna pour his drinks for him), is a proud and loving father who is keenly attuned to his children’s concerns. Thus, the opening of the novel introduces the reader to a happy, healthy family.

When Jonathan loses his job, however, family life changes. Embittered over the circumstances of his removal from the staff of The Clarion—the young, new editor-in-chief considers Jonathan’s features too intellectual for a local paper—he becomes cynical and frustrated. To salvage his self-esteem, he begins to write a novel and tells Elsbeth that he finds his new freedom invigorating. The project fails, however, as do his efforts to find free-lance work. The Douglases can no longer take middle-class comfort for granted: His family’s efforts to economize make Jonathan more depressed and unbearable to his family. In his gloominess, he bickers needlessly with Mark. He and Elsbeth, both now short-tempered, end each evening with a quarrel. Jonathan eventually distances himself from Joanna, as he rejects her sympathy and encouragement.

The strongest blow to Jonathan’s pride comes when Elsbeth becomes a panelist on a television game show and suddenly gains celebrity status. Now holding two jobs, she has usurped her husband’s role as primary breadwinner; this shift in the “balance of power,” as Mark calls it, is not easily accepted by Jonathan. He admits he feels like half a man when he is not working, and allows his resentment of Elsbeth’s success to strain their relationship to the breaking point. He is further upset that Elsbeth’s homemaking duties must be sacrificed to the late hours she devotes to her job. Elsbeth enjoys her television fame and becomes insensitive to her husband’s sagging self-esteem and Joanna’s frantic concern for the family. Every evening now erupts into argument; Mark spends all of his time in his room to avoid the frays.

Then, Joanna learns that Mark plans to drop out of the university to join a commune with his friends. This revelation is followed by Jonathan’s news of a summer newspaper job in Lerwick, on the northern Shetland coast. Jubilant, he expects that Elsbeth and Joanna will move with him to Lerwick for the summer. Joanna, overjoyed, sees an opportunity to pull the family together again. Elsbeth, however, coldly explains that her responsibilities to her work in town are too great to leave behind; she also declares that Joanna is too old for family holidays. This response crushes Joanna and embitters Jonathan so much that he and Elsbeth stop speaking. Joanna realizes that her parents’ marriage is seriously threatened.

The focus on Joanna intensifies. She is torn between her loyalties to her mother and father and troubled by her own search for self-identity. When she cannot decide whether to go to Lerwick with her father or stay home with her mother, she impetuously chooses to accompany her brother to the commune. There, she learns valuable lessons: that it is natural for people who live together to have difficulties, regardless of how much they have in common; and that she will not always be the daughter of a family, but must make a life of her own. Late that summer, she heads home to see her mother (now dating another panelist from the television show),

and then goes north to spend time with her father. Jonathan’s acceptance of a life alone grieves both of them, but the father and daughter are able to renew their relationship as new people who have each grown into new maturities. With Jonathan’s encouragement, Joanna begins a book that eventually leads to her first success in television writing. In her postscript to the novel, Joanna as first-person narrator reveals that she finds her new grown-up life very satisfying, even though her parents are separated, and will remain so. She understands that she can now devote her energies to herself and others, and finally accepts the breakup of the family with a clear-eyed wisdom that is the gift of her suffering.

Context

Honor Arundel is known for her understanding of the problems of contemporary teens and young adults. Many of her novels, A Family Failing included, are concerned with examining adolescent disillusionment with parents. Such is the theme of The Two Sisters (1969). The Longest Weekend (1969) and The Girl in the Opposite Bed (1970) explore the perceptions that mark one’s coming into maturity; and The Terrible Temptation (1971) examines how the price of selfishness weighs against the happiness one can find in exercising generosity of spirit. A Family Failing shares all these themes.

Arundel is interested in adolescent social development and her characters, usually adolescent girls, experience common problems of young female adulthood: disenchantment with self, parents, or school; uncertainty in love or friendship; fear of the complications of life. Her characters—sensitive, amusing, and always intelligent— are honestly drawn in that their failings (timidity, overreliance on others, selfishness) are as forthrightly described as their strengths (self-sufficiency, humor, and compassion). Joanna is a good example of the Arundel character: She is a strong-minded, perceptive, and witty young woman who, in spite of her feelings of independence, has difficulty accepting the fact that she will one day be on her own. She yearns for familiar settings and the family vacations of her youth. The unsentimental ending of A Family Failing fits the work squarely into Arundel’s canon of realistic, nonevasive explorations of young adulthood.