THE ISLAND COUNTRY

In Daub’s novel, an eccentric family of misfits on New York’s Long Island navigate the closed-minded prohibitions of America after World War II.

In 1954, Philip Smith is a police detective in Nassau County and the patriarch of an unusual family. His wife, Eunice, has delusions and is undergoing psychiatric treatment that involves powerful medications; she sometimes imagines that she’s a cement truck. Their child, 7-year-old Philip Jr. aspires to become a priest and traipses around the house wearing a “homemade clerical collar.” Three-year old Oscar is similarly precocious regarding his professional ambitions; he’s sure he will be a fireman. Daughter Joyce is a preternaturally talented artist, but her father finds her nude drawings of the family to be grotesque, and angrily objects to her fantasy to pursue painting professionally. Philip is a bigoted and provincial man, but he also enjoys vacationing in Paris with a colleague, Bruce Beasley, where they can wear dresses and wigs in public, far from people they know. Joyce, however, is the true hero of this work, which offers a series of comedic set pieces; she goes on to marry a shiftless “man-child” named Roger Ramsey, who leaves the U.S. Army to become a U.S. Customs inspector, and finally leaves him in the 1980s for porn actor Mike Ramone, known in the industry as “The Hammer.” This carefree novel maintains a silly tone throughout, which at best offers a sendup of the moral hypocrisy of the age. However, this work’s immature humor—as when Philip puts down Joyce’s dreams: “Do you honestly think someone’s gonna buy that filth of yours you call ‘art’? Try making a living that way and you'll wind up selling your paintings on a street corner like Hitler”—isn’t funny enough to make up for its scattered story and underdeveloped characters. Indeed, readers will find little that’s new in this satire, as Daub ultimately contributes nothing fresh to his well-traveled themes.

A disjointed and ultimately exhausting attempt at criticizing the mores of the past.