Red House by Mark Haddon (2012)

Since Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time book was so fascinating, and I know I read another of his books, I thought I should read this one too, but was disappointed. It is about a family - two families - Angela and her husband Dominick, children Alex, Daisy and Benji, who go off on holiday with Angela's brother Richard, his second wife Louisa and her daughter Michelle. Angela and Richard haven't spoken much, and this time together gives them the opportunity to reconnect, straighten out some misremembered family history. Each family member is struggling with something in their lives, and this leisurely time in the country (someplace in the UK) gives them time to work on it.

Haddon does have a great skill into getting into the heads of different types of people, but in this case none of them really appealed to me. The kids more than the adults, but even there I found myself not really caring what happens to them. If I had to pick a favorite, it might be Alex, who is a teen focused on sex and does a lot of running to use up his energy and maybe to be in shape. He ends up being the adult taking care of problems quite a few times.

Haddon tells the story from the point of view of all the characters, so you do get to  see inside each of them. His style includes random quotes appropriate to each character, and stream of consciousness words. This was a bit disconcerting when listening to the book, as I did not know with which character these quotes and words were associated. I tried to find a physical copy of the book to see if there were visual clues if you read the book, but neither our library nor the bookstore had it. I looked at his previous book - A Spot of Bother - as that was also written from many viewpoints, but had no visual clues as to which character was being described. I also looked up my blog entry for A Spot of Bother and found that I had a hard time warming up to it, but in the end liked it. This one, not so much.

I knew others would like it, so the review in GoodReads says:" The Red House is a literary tour-de-force that illuminates the puzzle of family in a profoundly empathetic manner."