SOURCE: “All in the Family,” in New Republic, No. 3649, December 24, 1984, pp. 36–9.

In the following excerpt, Hulbert discusses the role of the family in several novels, including Phillips's Machine Dreams.

In case all the babies don't make it clear, the babbling politicians do: the family is back in fashion. But Republicans, who prate about the family and freedom, and Democrats, who pontificate about the family and fairness, have it all wrong—as any baby or parent could tell them, given the words or the time. Fiction writers have both, and lately a striking number of them have been trying to write about what family life is really like. They don't evade the trammeled truth: that family relations are distinguished from most other ties precisely in being fundamentally unfree and all too often unfair. Yet this dark heart of domesticity doesn't depress these writers. Instead, they seem to be inspired...