Family Dancing

In his first collection of stories, David Leavitt surveys the modern family with a fine, cool eye, writing brilliantly of the ways in which we are formed and haunted by family life.
Most of David Leavitt's families are unhappy; each is unhappy in its own special way. In 'Territory,' a well-intentioned liberal mother with all the 'right' views finds her theoretical acceptance of her son's homosexuality shaken when he arrives home with a lover. In 'The Lost Cottage,' the recently separated Dempsons come together again with their adult children in the summer-house that they have rented for twenty years, only to find themselves re-enacting a ritual that has lost its emotional moorings. In 'Danny in Transit,' a small boy, passed back and forth between his hopelessly neurotic mother and his newly out-of-the-closet father, retreats into a secret world of imaginary television shows. And in the wonderfully funny and tender title story, a family made huge by divorce and remarriage find themselves at the end of a summer party literally dancing together in the recognition that they are still bound by the very things that split them apart: jealousy, dependency and disappointed expectations. David Leavitt is a new young writer, and 'Family Dancing' represents an extraordinarily impressive début.