M31: A Family Romance

Stephen Wright's M31: A Family Romance, is ostensibly about a family living in Iowa. That the parents of the family are luminaries on the UFO circuit, and claim to come from the planet Etheria in the M31 galaxy, is almost beside the point, for at the heart of this book is the soul of middle-America and the meaning of the American family.

The mother and father are Dash and Dot, who travel the country lecturing about UFOs and other metaphysical topics. They have an unruly brood of children, although we're never quite sure who belongs to whom, as parentage is called into question, and we're never quite sure how old they are. The older kids are Dallas, who spends his days drinking beer and making fun of everyone else, Trinity, who seems strangely normal, and Maryse, who is constantly clutching a sickly looking infant called Mignon. The younger kids are Edsel, who is convinced he's an orphan, and Zoe, who is supposedly some kind of receiver of intergalactic communication, and is therefore completely wild and has to be either tethered or sedated.

They live in a decommissioned church in Iowa, and the description of their home life reads like classic white trash literature. The place is a mess, with beer cans everywhere, and a pet goat roaming the yard (there's also a spaceship in the middle of the church). The kids are completely undisciplined. Into his mix enter Beale and Gwen, two acolytes who want to get up close to the great Dash. Beale is a true believer, while Gwen is more suspicious, although she has had a strange experience that may have been an alien abduction. It is through her eyes that we experience the first two-thirds of this slim book, as outsiders.

The book really takes off into virtuosity when the family is forced to flee the church. They hit the road, and it is here where Wright is both brilliantly funny and poignant as he depicts this strange caravan as essentially American. It is a bit breathtaking for a man who says he comes from another galaxy to tell his offspring the old classic, "You know what will happen if I'm forced to stop his car." Or consider this passage describing a rundown motel near the Illinois border: "The rooms were small and dank as monastery cells with a lingering canine aroma, the beds lumpy concavities of little comfort, but lapping at their door was a patio-sized pool of blue water seasoned with enough chlorine to sting the eye and bleach the facial hair." I think I've stayed there.

As this is a lyrical, literary work, there a lot of unanswered questions. Dash and Dallas have a row and the last section of the book concerns Dash as he takes Zoe to Washington, D.C., completely losing his moorings, and we never know what happens to the rest of them. In that way the end is a little unsatisfying. But for sections of this book I was completely transported by the prose, and having once attended a UFO conference, where speakers have straight-facedly told of their many abductions by alien races, it rings pretty true.