What are the motifs in The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus?

Consider the power of the family. Even in a book that dispassionately presents most human interactions, the power of the family to change, trouble, and inspire the individual remains an important theme. It also seems as if family influences creep into this book despite the narrator's attempts to remain aloof and "scientific" in his descriptions. He keeps drifting away from examinations of fathers as a group, or houses in general, to his father and his boyhood house. Sifting down through this aloof tone are mists of nostalgia, sadness, guilt, and longing.