American Family

by Robert Crooke

Overview

AMERICAN FAMILY is Tom Gannon's confession--a story of secrets and sins, set in 1950's America. Haunted by memories of his heroic father, Joe; his complicated grandfather, Hank; his stoic mother, Mary; and his boldly courageous sister, Liz, he weaves an engrossing tale--a classic narrative of love, courage, betrayal, and redemption--which he calls the story of a family, told by its "least worthy member".

American Family invokes a time when New York real estate development was controlled by arbitrary power-politics and prejudice, and when Congressional investigations into Communist influence in American institutions cast shadows of fear and suspicion over day-to-day life.

Robert Crooke summons a rich cast of characters onto this stage, and though they voice a variety of political convictions, this novelist is suspicious of extremes in ideology. It's more the human heart that interests him. And through the observant eyes of his flawed narrator, reminiscent of Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn, he takes an unforgettable journey into the moral truth of America's past--and present. It is an extraordinary reading experience in fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780595335657
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/20/2004
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

What People are Saying About This

E. L. Lefferts

"Robert Crooke's first novel is a murder mystery steeped in the fears and prejudices of a particularly ugly period in US history. American Family centers on 17-year-old Tom Gannon, the son of an attorney ruined by false rumors of ties to the Communist Party. The Gannon family suffers from the resulting "blacklisting" and the author's obvious insider-knowledge of big-money real estate deals helps him explain why in an interesting way. By locating a key property development of the story in Harlem, Crooke also explores another real-life casualty of the Communist witch-hunt era-African-American civil rights."
—The Litchfield County Times

Editorial Reviews

"Novels set in the near past involving the political extremes we have lived through can be very intriguing. When the book is a bucolic that turns into a mystery, then into a thriller, then into a polemic and then back into a bucolic, scraping the family saga genre on the way, it's a lot to take in all at one reading. Difficult, that is, unless it's so well crafted that it simply drags you along from format to format until you can't keep from picking it back up to find out which book you're reading with the same gusto you put into following the storyline. Robert Crooke's "American Family" is such a book. It begins with a sweetly reminiscent sensibility and without too much warning begins to infiltrate a political agenda into its narrative. Tom Gannon, the book's protagonist and its narrative voice, is a high school student who lives in one of those quaint small towns along the eastern shore of the Hudson River, not far from West Point. His father, a lawyer, is a man who operates on principal and his beliefs in the rights of the human being to equality in all things affect the entire Gannon family. Tom is at the point in a young man's life when romance, sex, politics, morality and the rest of the adolescent mix begin to confuse the heretofore important issues of school and family. He finds himself with a girlfriend, the daughter of a wealthy and important man who, it turns out, is his father's enemy. Tom becomes a man long before he finishes his boyhood and that is the central thread of this novel. This loss of innocence is handled delicately and brilliantly through small conversions in Tom's belief system. What he witnesses and what he experiences help create the man he becomes. The end of the novel weaves together threads that have been loosely woven throughout the book, presenting an almost too perfect piece of cloth. The only reason this works, in this instance, is the quality of the prose that precedes the final chapter. Crooke leaves his flow, and summarizes with style and efficiency, even creating the extra tear in the eye of the reader. It's very well done."
—The Berkshire Eagle

J. Peter Bergman

"Like his hero Holden Caulfield, 17-year-old Tom Gannon is a private-school student too intelligent and conscientious for his own good. His frustration is aimed at both those who care too little-his privileged classmates, indifferent to the social injustices that surround them-and those who care too much, especially his father Joe. A liberal lawyer who has spent years and his fortune fighting for urban renewal in Manhattan's blighted neighborhoods, Joe seems willing to strike a Faustian bargain by testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The day Joe leaves for Washington, however, he disappears under mysterious circumstances, leading Tom and his family to suspect a cover-up on the part of New York's political and real-estate elites. To his credit, Crooke, a former sportswriter and Long Island historian, manages to remain faithful to the complex and treacherous politics of the 1950s, and his characters' moral battles, even as the mystery heats up. There's not an unlikable or dull character among the lot-even Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson make appearances. But after two family members die violently, and with scarcely a reaction on the part of the Gannons, the family's stoicism becomes bewildering. The comparisons Crooke makes between the Red Scare and the post-9/11 era are interesting and apt, but better attention to pacing would have helped this American Family."

Kirkus Discoveries

"Robert Crooke paints a vivid picture of American society in the 1950s when the McCarthy Senate Investigations and the House Committee on Un-American Activities needlessly ruined the lives of numerous citizens falsely branded as Communists. In this climate of fear, Joe Gannon is accused of "subversive affiliations" as he champions underprivileged black Americans through development of a low-income housing project in Harlem. The project meets opposition, perhaps most ironically from Charles Stannard, the wealthy father of young Tom Gannon's girlfriend. But Tom doesn't discover this until later as he comes face to face with the adult world of greed, betrayal, bigotry and hatred. In this frequently surprising story, the reader also learns that Joe Gannon's worst opponent is much closer to home.

And as the story concludes, Tom learns a powerful and tragic life lesson that ultimately changes the course of his destiny. His dramatic search for the truth makes American Family the true thriller that it is, and his frantic efforts to find out, at any cost, what really happened to his father, Joe, are unforgettable. This is a compelling and suspenseful tale."

Artis Magazine

"Once in a while we are privileged to read a novel that not only affords us the opportunity to reflect on significant events in our country's history, but also engages and sustains our interest by providing us with an exciting and suspenseful story. Robert Crooke has accomplished just that combination in his stunning debut novel, American Family. The book offers a poignant story of 1950s America, and is a story of family relationships and of struggles that accompany those relationships. It is a story of loss and sorrow, but also growth and understanding. American Family touches on the themes of goodness and evil, the value of a moral perspective and the importance of defending the less fortunate. This work should establish its author as one of today's talented writers of fiction."
—New Milford Spectrum

Patricia D'Ascoli

"Early on in Robert Crooke's novel American Family, Tom Gannon, the first person narrator looks back to the 1950s and tells the reader that he's someone who rejected the activist ideal that the world can be "changed, not merely endured." To Tom, it once "seemed crazy to think that way." And so it would seem at the outset that what we have here is a cautionary tale from the viewpoint of an ultra-conservative. Or perhaps a fictional justification for a life lived as one of the "silent majority" as those who spent their formative years during the Eisenhower administration were called. After all, this was a period when you could get into trouble for speaking out of turn. If you openly challenged any of the precepts of your teachers, it could go down on your permanent record and your chances of climbing the "ladder of success" would greatly diminish. If you also challenged any prevalent government policies or had leftist leanings as Tom' s father Joe did, and supported "Negro" enterprises in New York that might compromise the economic or political machinations of the day, you found yourself out of favor. In this case, you lost clients right and left (Joe Gannon was a lawyer closely associated with a "Negro" entrepreneur) and ran the risk of running up against Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist-hunting machine. In writing this novel, perhaps Mr. Crooke's greatest achievement is to incite the reader's hunger for immediacy, conflict, and a narrative thrust, looking forward to the point where Tom's sins of omission will come back to haunt him. Reading portents of the price of loyalty and the threat of betrayal, we root for Tom to take action, even if it guarantees that the Gannons will never become a normal American family. In sum, what Mr. Crooke offers us here is not an ultra-conservative morality tale after all. Rather, it's one in which engagement, no matter what the cost-even for a lost cause-may be far better than objectively sitting on the fence, being cool, playing it safe and keeping out of trouble. The latter may be tantamount to a great moral failing and a life not worth living."
—The Country and Abroad

Shelly Frome