Big Brother: Brilliant family fiction from the award-winning author of We Need To Talk About Kevin

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Cedar Rapids Airport was small and user-friendly, its beige décor a picture frame for whatever more colorful passengers deplaned there. At the end of September, baggage claim was deserted, and I was relieved to have arrived before Edison's flight landed. If people divide into those who worry about having to wait and those who worry about keeping others waiting, I fell firmly into the second camp. Wise high-flyers kept this battle with the baffling flatness of success discreetly to themselves. Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn't a very nice sensation to not want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing. I had always been a hard worker, and this damnable repleteness was enervating. Without a doubt, there was only one solution to my growing torpidity, my Thanksgiving-dinner stupor writ large: Yet even the innocuous question I put instead sounded loaded: "So what have you been up to?" As if it weren't obvious.

Shriver brilliantly explores the strength of sibling bonds versus the often more fragile ties of marriage." - Booklist Oh, God, not another photo shoot," I said before I realized how that sounded. "I hate them," I continued, them making it worse, since the very plurality was the problem. "I can't stand having to decide what to wear, and it doesn't even matter since I always look hideous," always continuing to dig my grave. Since it was true enough, in my haste to say something more self-deprecating still to cover for the embarrassing fact of the shoot itself, I almost added, but pulled up short just in time, that lately all I could think when I saw pictures of myself in the media was that I looked fat. The electronic device buried in the torso included twenty edicts and exclamations. Little had I known that my mischievous little handicraft would soon become a monster. We finally reached the exit. I said, casually, why don't I bring the car around, though I was parked only a hundred yards away. A middle-aged woman with smartly cut auburn hair who'd been loitering by the information booth had followed us outside — confirming my suspicion that Edison and I were being stared at.The characterization stung. "Edison has a son somewhere, but his ex got full custody when the boy was a baby. So your uncle doesn't have much experience talking to kids — " Jesus, it's like he's trying to sound like a jazz musician," Tanner grumbled once Edison had shambled outside. "Like some stereotype of a jazz musician that wouldn't wash in a biopic because it's trite. You're not going to tell me, Pando, that he grew up speaking jive." Travis Appaloosa sounds made up — since it was. "Dad," né Hugh Halfdanarson, had assumed his barmy stage name when I was six and Edison nine, too late to sound anything but artificial. So we always called him Travis, with an implicit elbow in the ribs, a get-a-load-of-this.

Hey, bro, good to see you, man!" Edison clapped Fletcher's shoulder and attempted that double handshake up the elbow, but my husband was too dazed to do it right, and they settled on a pat of an embrace. Edison might not have precisely enjoyed this brand of encounter, but he must have had frequent enough experience with meeting someone who'd last seen him at about 165 to have learned to take a compensatory satisfaction in other people's transparent hypocrisy. They couldn't say anything, and whatever they said instead was so extravagantly and obviously at odds with what was going through their heads that the disparity must have stirred a sour internal smile.Nah, that was just the airline being impatient. Don't walk fast as I used to." Edison — or the creature that had swallowed Edison — heaved toward the baggage belt. "But I thought you didn't see me." Edison's tone was playful but needling. Of the three kids in our father's supposedly cutting-edge one-hour drama, Floy Newport was the closest I had to a doppelgänger, although — oddly, since Edison of all people should know the difference — he was confusing Floy the actress with Maple Fields, the character she played. On Joint Custody, Maple was the middle one, sandwiched between prodigies, eternally unnoticed and not especially good at anything. Whereas Edison had reviled the character he most resembled in the show, Caleb Fields, as much as the vain pretty boy Sinclair Vanpelt who played him, I'd identified with Maple Fields completely. I gather they've had to recalculate the number of 'average' passengers older planes can take," said the man. "But you're right: normal people are subsidizing — "

Searching again for Edison, I scanned their fellow passengers, to whose geometry I'd become so inured that at first I missed the snotty woman's inference. Earlier generations built on acute angles, today's Americans were constructed with perpendiculars, and the posteriors lining the baggage belt were uniformly square. Given the perplexing popularity of "low rise" jeans, tight waistbands crossed the hips at their widest point and bit under the gut, which the odd short-cut top exposed in all its convex glory. I avoided the unfortunate fashion, but with those twenty extra pounds I didn't stand out from the crowd myself. So I felt personally insulted when the sportsman muttered to his companion, "Welcome to Iowa." If I could have gotten away with it, I'd have been pulling the ridge of a flattened hand across my throat. Tanner's expectations were already unrealistic. I didn't want him encouraged. I don't know how long he'll stay," I said quietly. "But while he's here, I want you to imagine what it might be like if you two grow up, and then you, Tanner, visit your sister and her family, and maybe you've had a hard time, and maybe you've been hitting the Häagen-Dazs. Wouldn't you want your sister to still treat you like the same person? Wouldn't you feel hurt if her family made fun of you?" I'm not dissing Wynton Marsalis," Edison was opining. "He's brought in some bread, if nothing else. But the trouble with Wynton is he feeds this whole nostalgia thing, like jazz is over, you hear what I'm sayin'? Like it's in a museum, under glass. Nothing wrong with keeping the standards alive, so long as you don't turn the whole field into one big snoring PBS doc. 'Cause it's still evolving, dig? I mean, you got a certain amount of lost free crap, which the public hates, and drives what few folks do listen to jazz even further into the ass of the past. Cats who blow all freaky don't appreciate that even Ornette riffed on an underlying structure. But other Post-Bop cats out there are killing. Even some of Miles's contemporaries are still playing, still innovating: Sonny, Wayne ..." Aptly for the last father-son interchange, the third time Cody pulled the doll's string it declared with exalted sanctimony, I want DRY toast! I want DRY toast!Yet during my childhood and adolescence Travis Appaloosa had lilted with the tuneful familiarity of Bill Bixby, Danny Bonaduce, and Barbara Billingsley. Maybe any sequence of syllables that rings out across the nation every Wednesday at nine simply cannot sound ridiculous. From 1974 to 1982, Travis Appaloosa was part of the landscape, just as Hugh Halfdanarson had always hoped. My product had just begun to capture the popular imagination, and I was still excited; why, my pull-string dolls were apparently all the rage among the upper crust in my brother's own city, having just been the subject of New York magazine's lead story, "Monotonous Manhattan" — with inset scripts of Donald Trump and Mayor Bloomberg dolls. But the tone with which Edison congratulated me on my appearance on that cover had disinclined me to dial again soon. All the words were in the right place, and the slight sneering or testiness might have been in my head; you could never quite trust the phone. Lecturing on environmentalism, believe it or not," said Edison with a laugh. "Chump never recycled a Coke can in his life." Doesn't matter why," said Tanner, struggling to stand up straight. "They're always funny, they only get funnier, and that's why Pandora is rich." I was grateful when you offered to switch," said the woman. "I was totally smashed against the window. But letting him have the aisle didn't help you much."

I sighed. "You should have had some pie. Before Edison finished it off." I nestled my head on his chest. For once his build seemed not a reprimand, but a marvel. I'd heard enough. Clearing my throat, I walked in. "Get it out of your system now. Just because someone's overweight doesn't mean he has no feelings." Yet when I closed the door behind us, the atmosphere remained conspiratorial. I'm going to share a flat with Edison for a year," I said, as if this was the most normal thing in the world rather than an unlikely plot twist. "We can diet together." So how was your flight?" Dull, but my mind was spinning. Edison had stirred a range of emotions in me over the years: awe, humility, frustration (he never shut up). But I had never felt sorry for my brother, and the pity was horrible. It's impolite to talk about money. And your uncle Edison seems to have fallen on tough times. You don't want to rub it in."Tanner will never get fat!" said Cody. "He's got to watch his figure so he can keep pawing all over his girlfriends." Shriver's long residence abroad leads to several Briticisms incongruous in a novel narrated by an Iowan: "fiddly scraps from the food processor," "toilet roll" instead of toilet paper, "verges" for road shoulders, a "slimmer" instead of a dieter. More jarring is Edison's unconvincing jive talk, peppered with "You dig?" Well, that last line would be a recent addition. I collected the plates, while Edison heaved from the maroon recliner — again — to head to the patio to smoke. So Tanner had once more to get up, push his chair in, and maneuver out of the way. It was chilly for the end of September, and each lumbering departure and reentry lowered the temperature by five degrees. The central heating couldn't keep up, and Cody had to slip upstairs to get us both sweaters. I was reconciled that Tanner and Cody had to negotiate a world in which people smoked. Given that my brother was not only chronically short of breath but also himself a heavy cat, the kids probably wouldn't view him as a role model. But Fletcher tensed every time we went through all this brouhaha for an unfiltered Camel. He didn't want anyone smoking around the kids. When Edison withdrew his cigarettes, I urged him to the patio. We didn't allow smoking in the house.