The decline of the traditional nuclear family has been accompanied
by a diversification of household arrangements in the United States. The
very existence of these households necessarily challenges "mainstream"
attitudes concerning the proper role and place of women, the regulation
of sexuality, the boundaries of families, and appropriate child-rearing
environments and philosophies. But because of the ideological impor-
tance of the nuclear family, an increasingly contentious debate has been
waged in recent decades about what, if anything, can or should be done
to halt or reverse its decline. To the degree that this debate enshrines the
traditional nuclear family as an ideal or historically permanent institu-
tion, it is as imbued with utopianism as the representations of
"alternative" families in contemporary American fiction that I will dis-
cuss. Chapter 2, "The Family in Crisis," provides a brief overview of
this debate.

This discussion of the disparate "readings" of the family's "crisis"
offered by a number of prominent social historians is followed by an ex-
amination of the alternative families in the novels of four contemporary
American writers: John Updike, John Irving, Alice Walker, and E. L.
Doctorow. In a world where our closest bonds of kinship have been
radically altered in a relatively brief period of time, many contemporary
novelists are imagining new familial arrangements. While they are not
alone in their interest in the new complexities of American domestic life,
each of these writers has achieved both critical and public acclaim. Two
of Updike "Rabbit" novels received the Pulitzer prize for fiction, for
example, as did Alice Walker The Color Purple. The works I will dis-
cuss are also among the most widely read contemporary American nov-
els.

The term "reconstructing" in my title is of particular importance be-
cause it underscores the utopian nature of many of these fictional fami-
lies. Webster Third New International Dictionary includes the follow-
ing definitions of "reconstruct": "to build again: rebuild . . . reorganize,
reestablish . . . rehabilitate." ³ The word connotes an imaginative act of
creation that does not validate or mimic what came before. In the con-
temporary climate of confusion over the future of the family, some

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