Skateaway

by Michael Grant Jaffe

Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 352 pp., $24

In Skateaway, Michael Grant Jaffe writes the lives of the three small-town Boone siblings. Much happens in the day-to-day course of their lives, and yet the sea of plush details Jaffe offers transcends the particular. Though the artist-father goes crazy (he thinks he’s a superhero named “Sonic Boone”) and the mother performs abortions (causing a constant swell of protesters on the lawn), this is not a novel about insanity or abortion. Though the three children grow up, move away, and start their own families, to call it a “coming-of-age tale” would be equally reductive. Every one of the five family members is fully, meticulously drawn by Jaffe’s lush prose, and yet the story is not especially about any of them individually. Skateaway is a lyrical and emotionally authentic epic about the coming apart and coming together of a family as average and as eccentric as any other.

This article appears in November 19 • 1999.

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