The writers whose novels will be my focus also have in common
some important concerns pertaining to the construction and operation of
families. Each of them addresses the problem of defining individuals and
groups outside the traditional familial circle. These novels grapple with
the difficulty of overcoming what can be a xenophobic isolation of the
traditional family unit by broadening its membership and loosening its
boundaries. This project has mixed results in Ragtime and dire conse-
quences in Updike's novels, in which the Biblical punishments of fire
and water claim the lives of two "daughters." Walker's Celie and
Irving's Garp are more successful in constructing alternative families
consisting of both biological and "emotional" kin. Their families also
challenge traditional gender roles and responsibilities. The novels of
Updike, Irving, and Walker also depict acts of sexual violence that take
place within or are linked to traditional families: Walker and Irving offer
a program for recovery within alternative households. Both Updike's
Rabbit and Irving's Garp wrestle with their personal culpability in the
death of a child: the differences in their responses inform our readings of
the familial alternatives in their worlds. Finally, there is a common diffi-
culty in providing more than a rudimentary, sketchy glimpse of life
within the alternative families in these novels. Updike provides the full-
est description of an alternative family among these writers, but his aim
is to discredit what he depicts as an aberrant situation. Both Garp's ab-
sence and Irving's matter-of-fact narrative style distance us from what
we learn about the fate of Garp's extended family in the novel's final
chapter, "Life After Garp." And Walker and Doctorow conclude with
utopian visions of alternative families that serve more as prophesies of
future harmony than as full accounts of life within these new house-
holds. I will return to these points of comparison among the novels of
Updike, Irving, Walker, and Doctorow in chapter 7.

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