Growing up slow

The whole country seemed to offer up people made to feel small by one thing or another. Sun. Space. Each other. Tiny Americans everywhere. Drifting and drifting.

Devin Murphy, Tiny Americans

In Devin Murphy's novel Tiny Americans (2019), the three Thurber siblings are made to feel small by their quarreling parents, a drunken father and a mother more committed to her art than to her family. The parents have their own reasons for feeling small.

Beginning in 1978, when the kids are young, and following one character or another over the next 40 years. Murphy shows us the consequences of parental neglect.

Terrance Thurber, the father, soon abandons his family and heads out to a remote part of the West.

The son Lewis, one of the most intriguing characters, becomes a sailor, first in the Navy and later the merchant marine. He feels fully a man only when at sea.  Connor, the other son, reflects in 2005, "I'd become the kind of father I resented my own dad for being." Jamie, the daughter, seemingly prospers, but it takes years before she can say of her parents, "Everything I thought they burdened me with suddenly seems to switch from their lack to something different. Something I couldn't see until now. A wash of forgiveness comes."

The siblings independently become ready for reconciliation by the time Terrance sends each of them a letter inviting them to a family reunion.

The novel's chapters read like standalone stories, yet together they show a family that however broken remains bound by love. Murphy shows that love makes us bigger.