The Flying Troutmans is the fifth novel by the American-born writer Miriam Toews, who now lives in Canada. An enthusiastic review of an earlier novel invoked Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and in The Flying Troutmans Toews wastes no time in setting out her stall of troubled but ultimately redemptive family life. The first line of the novel reads, "Yeah, so things have fallen apart."

The narrator is Hattie, the 28-year-old sister of Min, and aunt of Min's children, Logan, 15, and Thebes, 11, and the reason she knows things have fallen apart is because Thebes called her in Paris to tell her so. The falling-apart of things was why Hattie left Canada. Her family background is not auspicious: her father drowned when Hattie was nine and Min was 15, trying to rescue them from a riptide in Acapulco.

But things went wrong for Min long before that. It is Hattie's belief that "my birth triggered a seismic shift in my sister's life", plunging her into a cosmic sulk from which she never emerged. Since Hattie's birth, Min has been captivating and destructive, driving away first Cherkis, an artist and the father of her two children, and then Hattie.

Now she learns Min is in hospital, starving, silent and in a state of near catatonia. The children have been taking care of her as best they can, but their house is crumbling, Logan is out of control and someone grown-up urgently needs to take charge. Hattie's response is open-hearted: "I told [Thebes] I'd be there as soon as I could. I had no choice. There was no question. Our parents are dead. Min didn't have anybody else. And in just about every meaningful way, neither did I."

Arriving back home, she finds her niece unwashed and unnervingly voluble, her nephew resentful and withdrawn, her sister apparently suicidal, declining to co-operate with treatment and eventually refusing visits from Hattie and the children. Hattie decides that the way out of the impasse is to take the children on a road trip to South Dakota, where their father may be staying.

At this point the plot takes off with extraordinary verve into a cheery North American picaresque, with all the traditional trimmings – spooky motels, peculiar hitchhikers, mechanical failure, bad food and a lovable tag-along mutt. There is even a happy ending of sorts, just damaged and ambiguous enough not to appear painfully trite.

The disjunction between the surface of the narrative, which appears to be begging to be made into a feel-good family movie, and its tragic supporting premise – deranged mother, absent father, painfully neglected and damaged children – is extremely disturbing.

The family dynamics are described but not explored and it never occurs to Hattie that she could help Logan and Thebes in far more practical ways than taking a road trip.

The resulting confection, though fluent and amusingly written, forces the reader to suspend disbelief until every imaginative muscle burns with the effort. "Our own family doctor said there was nothing wrong with Min that a little maturity wouldn't straighten out," Hattie remarks at one point. "She needed to grow up, basically, was his theory." It is hard, at the end of this tiresome and manipulative novel, not to agree with the doctor.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... eview.html