Tame family dramas: Christmas in Austin, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed

My partner’s brother once found himself accidentally locked into his flat on Christmas Day, which meant having to spend it alone with his dog — an outcome he may shortly have cause to recall with no little longing, given that we’ve decided to host this year.

At least we haven’t sneakily invited his ex along too. That’s the curveball flung at one of the characters in Benjamin Markovits’s new novel, the latest in his unashamedly old-fashioned and vastly enjoyable quartet-in-progress about a high-flying, Obama-era American family modelled, as you might guess, on his own.

In the first part, A Weekend in New York, the parents and siblings of journeyman tennis pro Paul Essinger gathered to watch him compete in the first round of the US Open. Now it’s 2012 — two years on — and Paul has left not only the sport but also his girlfriend, Dana, and their four-year-old son, Cal, quitting Brooklyn to live near his parents in Texas.

His mother’s decision to ask Dana over for Christmas (‘I didn’t think she would say yes’) along with her own other three children — a legal don, a television producer and a literary academic — adds extra needle to an inevitable week-long crossfire over everything, from coffee to airport runs to whether a ten-month-old should still be breastfed.

With tennis off the menu, there’s even less drama than in A Weekend in New York, despite an agonisingly clumsy episode in which Paul misreads Dana’s ‘yes’ to staying overnight at his own place; action tends to revolve more around such matters as Cal’s ear infection, which leaves Paul’s sister Susie, wrangling three kids of her own, struggling to hide her horror at his unwashed hands.

There’s a degree of nervousness, I think, about books like this right now.