A Field Guide to the North American Family
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Knopf
2007, reprinted in 2017
A Field Guide to the North American Family is a novella-length collection of literary short stories that narrate a turbulent year in the lives of two neighboring suburban families. Field Guide also employs a number of gimmicks that only partially work together.
The Hungates and Harrisons are neighbors on Long Island. Oldest son Gabe Hungate and oldest daughter Lacey Harrison were born about the same time, and the two families have been close ever since. Over the course of the year, Mr Harrison dies, Mr and Mrs Hungate get divorced, Gabe and Lacey date then break up, and Gabe gets in an accident that leaves him covered in severe burns.
The stories present all this in a roughly chronological order, and from a variety of perspectives - accounts from all 8 family members (Gabe and Lacey each have a younger sibling), from friends at school, and from an omniscient narrator, presented in a mix of first and third person. As you read each story (typically vignette length, less than a page), you have to figure out who it's about and when it happens in order to add it to your understanding of the overall narrative.
Each story has a title like "Divorce" or "Sibling Rivalry," and they're arranged alphabetically, as though Field Guide really was an encyclopedia of family topics. The stories are sometimes closely, sometimes only barely related to the titles. Adding to this gimmick, each story is cross-referenced with a number of others, like social scientific encyclopedia entries would be. Supposedly, these references provide an alternate, non-alphabetical reading order, although since there are like 4-6 per story, I wasn't sure how to actually use them in that way.
The last gimmick is that each of the 60-something stories has an accompanying photograph and caption. Each photo was taken by a different artist, and their connections to either the title or story tends to be oblique. The captions are only a sentence or two long, and are written more like natural science, as though the title topic was an animal species. So they'll say things like 'Due to a growth curve similar to that of Depression, a robust Divorce population has become common wherever Love dwells in large numbers.' The captions have no relation to the stories at all. If Hallberg had leaned into that style, he would've ended up with something much weirder, and possibly more interesting, akin to Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String.
As it stands, I'm not sure the payoff is worth all the effort, or more importantly, if the story is even worth telling, or the gimmicks do anything to enrich it. I don't think I would have been interested in this narrative if it had been told conventionally, and I can't help but feel that the format is wasted, reduced to little more than a recurring page layout, used in a way that doesn't take advantage of its unique storytelling possibilities.
The Hungates and Harrisons are neighbors on Long Island. Oldest son Gabe Hungate and oldest daughter Lacey Harrison were born about the same time, and the two families have been close ever since. Over the course of the year, Mr Harrison dies, Mr and Mrs Hungate get divorced, Gabe and Lacey date then break up, and Gabe gets in an accident that leaves him covered in severe burns.
The stories present all this in a roughly chronological order, and from a variety of perspectives - accounts from all 8 family members (Gabe and Lacey each have a younger sibling), from friends at school, and from an omniscient narrator, presented in a mix of first and third person. As you read each story (typically vignette length, less than a page), you have to figure out who it's about and when it happens in order to add it to your understanding of the overall narrative.
Each story has a title like "Divorce" or "Sibling Rivalry," and they're arranged alphabetically, as though Field Guide really was an encyclopedia of family topics. The stories are sometimes closely, sometimes only barely related to the titles. Adding to this gimmick, each story is cross-referenced with a number of others, like social scientific encyclopedia entries would be. Supposedly, these references provide an alternate, non-alphabetical reading order, although since there are like 4-6 per story, I wasn't sure how to actually use them in that way.
The last gimmick is that each of the 60-something stories has an accompanying photograph and caption. Each photo was taken by a different artist, and their connections to either the title or story tends to be oblique. The captions are only a sentence or two long, and are written more like natural science, as though the title topic was an animal species. So they'll say things like 'Due to a growth curve similar to that of Depression, a robust Divorce population has become common wherever Love dwells in large numbers.' The captions have no relation to the stories at all. If Hallberg had leaned into that style, he would've ended up with something much weirder, and possibly more interesting, akin to Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String.
As it stands, I'm not sure the payoff is worth all the effort, or more importantly, if the story is even worth telling, or the gimmicks do anything to enrich it. I don't think I would have been interested in this narrative if it had been told conventionally, and I can't help but feel that the format is wasted, reduced to little more than a recurring page layout, used in a way that doesn't take advantage of its unique storytelling possibilities.
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