[The Family] is a novel (or so it seems to this reader) that had to be written to get a part of his past off the writer's chest.

If the emotional urgency of The Family should turn out not to be true in a more than literary sense, then David Plante is a very good pretender. For in this extended portrait of a working-class French Canadian family living in Rhode Island, Daniel, the next-to-last of seven sons, is the only character with whom we empathize as well as sympathize. Daniel's mind is, we suppose, the author's; and it is Daniel's adolescent sensitivity we follow as it widens into an understanding of the complicated yet narrowly innocent relationship between his mother, Reena, and his father, Jim Francoeur—as, in turn, their relationship is strained by the difficult love and need for independence of their sons….

The sons, each one...