The ensemble of narrators in Bill Clegg’s novel Did You Ever Have a Family could have been a confusing muddle; a puddle of potential, dried up. But what we have is structure so brilliantly mastered, the narrators together form a character of their own.
The plot—centred around a small-town tragedy that only slowly becomes apparent through the shifting narrative—is propulsive and full of surprises, open loops and curiosities.
Right away, we’re emotionally invested in the characters. We’re curious about June who, at first, is a stranger wearing the same clothes for days. We care about what Silas meant when he wondered whether something happened last night. How small-town, small-minded gossip can skew truth.
Books with multiple narrators can be hard to pull off. Attention and interest tend to wax and wane through each POV-swap. But not in Did You Ever Have a Family, which—even through areas with more mystique than clarity—reads like a cohesive whole. Like how a drop of rain lands in a puddle and circles reverberate outward. Like how, in his essay Circles, Emerson paraphrases St. Augustine as saying: god is a circle where the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
There are passages that feel like a character is reporting on what happened. Then, there are passages where we’re dropped so astutely into moments, we, too, need to go silent to remain undetected; to smell the wood of an old cafe; to feel a creep of discomfort move up our spine.
Through every turn and perspective, there’s this feeling of trust for the author; we suspect that he knows exactly what he’s doing and why as he plops us along his nonlinear timeline where the truth slowly and quickly reveals itself until, by the end, we know for sure.
An impeccable, 5-star read. Highly recommend.
