Family Politics, by John Buckley (Simon & Schuster, 332 pp., $18.95)
Early on in this delightful tale, a prospective girlfriend tells the protagonist, Charlie Daley, “I really have never met anyone who placed such importance on his family. You read the world into them.” Which suggests the curse/blessing of those big, brawly families: they are their own worlds, or at least their own societies, sharing histories, always maintaining themselves, regardless of division within, intact against the other, outer world. But at a price: “The family made tacit demands on all of us,” Charlie explains,
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