November 30, 2022
Flight, by Lynn Steger Strong
“What were the rules for loving people who were not obliged to love you? How did you know when and how to trust they wouldn’t destroy you too?”
Readers who were drawn to Lynn Steger Strong’s articulation of parenting and family life amidst an age of anxiety in her previous novel Want will find the same frantic tension in her follow-up Flight, but with an expanded canvas exploring the psyches of eight different people, including three siblings celebrating their first Christmas since their mother’s death, their respective spouses, and a local woman and her daughter in the rural town where they’re all spending the holiday with the looming question of what to do with their mother’s house hanging over their heads.
And oh yes, anxiety abounds, including financial anxiety, and parenting anxiety, and climate anxiety, and the existential drama of trying to be in the world when the one person who’d held that world and all its meaning together…is gone.
The book resonated, and I devoured it, the plot taut and so compelling as the siblings come together in a moment of extra-family crisis, but I also read it with great interst in and respect for its crafting, for the cumulative depths of so many different points of view, for how so many parts culminate in such a rich and satisfying whole.
Of course, there’s obligatory bitchiness and bad behaviour, all delicious and readable, inevitable when any family dynamic gets put under the microscope, but where Steger Strong really succeeds is in making her story more than that. Imagining something better, the possibility of warmth and connection persisting, of mutual understanding.
