68 pages • 2 hours read
Shari LapenaNot a Happy Family
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Turkey Vultures
As Detectives Reyes and Barr first exit the Merton home after their initial inspection of the bloody crime scene, both are shocked by the brutality of the killings. Due to this, they suspect that the killings were personal, not a robbery gone wrong. As the two walk toward the driveway, Reyes’ eyes are drawn upward, where “[f]ive or six large birds gliding on the currents, high in the air” (43). Reyes identifies the birds as turkey vultures, and comments, “They probably smell the blood” (43). Later Jenna, ever the goth, notices the same birds circling lazily over the Merton home.
At their most basic, the vultures symbolize the reality of the two dead parents. The vultures hang about the Merton home because the parents’ corpses have been left out for more than a day. Turkey vultures feast on carrion: They thrive on eating dead or decaying flesh to the point where often they stuff themselves so full they cannot attain flight. Despite this, vultures are highly intelligent and use their overdeveloped radar system to devise strategies for finding and feasting on carcasses without exposing themselves to dangers—they take the measure of a situation and resolve how best to get what they need without risk.
Often in murder mysteries involving high-profile murders, the designation of vultures is usually reserved for heartless paparazzi who sensationalize the murder without sensitivity to the family of the deceased. They represent anyone who feasts happily on whatever tidbits they can find out about the dead. Ironically, here, it is the reverse. The local newspaper reporter who talks with Audrey is quite respectful of the family and the news reports are cautious in their speculations. In this book, the vultures actually represent the Merton children. The early appearance of the vultures foreshadows the siblings’ views of their parents, and their approach to dealing with the murder. With the death of their parents, the siblings slowly, deliberately, circle about, strategizing and considering the best moves to protect themselves while waiting patiently to gorge themselves on their parents’ money.
Easter
Not a Happy Family opens on Easter, and the murders take place Easter evening. Easter is the traditional commemoration of the resurrection of Christ. The holiday thus symbolizes a rebirth of life, a restoration of hope. As a signal of the end of winter, Easter represents fertility, the gift of life, and the reassuring return of nature.
The novel uses the Easter holiday ironically. Rather than symbolizing the generous gift of love conventionally associated with the resurrection, the Sunday dinner becomes an occasion for the siblings to bare their teeth. At that dinner, Fred Merton shatters the family calm by announcing his intention to sell the family house, knowing the announcement will send his loving children into a frenzy. The news destroys the pretense of civility, much less love. Fred’s diatribe curses fertility: One by one, he degrades his children, pointing out how they have disappointed him. The dinner descends into something of an anti-Easter holiday, the family splitting along familiar fault lines. The dinner ends with abrupt, acrimonious goodbyes.
Even more ironically, Easter here symbolizes not the renewal of life but the fast approach of death. A holiday centered on rebirth, on new life, ends with a brutal murder. Fred is even murdered with the very knife he used to carve the turkey at Easter dinner, further driving home the antithetical holiday symbolism.
Robotics
The Merton family fortune has been made in robotics. Although the details of Fred’s business acumen and his contributions to the business are never enumerated, the dimensions of his success are undeniable. The company he began, and later sold at an optimum moment for high profit, gives him a comfortable mansion in the Hudson River Valley and a personal net worth of close to $30 million.
Robotics symbolizes how Fred Merton responds to people, specifically his inability to respond with sympathy. He regards his family as little more than machines that he can direct and manipulate. Their emotional complications, their hungers, their needs are irrelevant to him. Robotics suggests a coldness to Fred Merton, a lack of people skills. He figures only in a single scene, the family’s Easter Sunday dinner, and as he goes around the dinner table and points out the flaws in his children, he does so with cold detachment, the way a robot would.
That dispassionate treatment extends to his father, who had an alcohol addiction and was physically and verbally abusive. Fred murders his father, stages a suicide, and effortlessly crafts a lie for his sister, all of which show an extreme lack of empathy. He deals with people emotionlessly, throwing money at potential problems—he pays Ellen and puts Rose in his will to buy their silence about the affair, and he intends to change his will to include Audrey, who has kept the secret of their father’s murder their whole lives. This leads several characters to consider him “a psychopath”—or, in other words, a robot.
The Hudson River Valley
Not a Happy Family is set, as are all of Shari Lapena’s murder thrillers, in the Hudson River Valley: “Situated on the east side of the Hudson River, about a hundred miles north of New York City” (1). The town of Aylesford seems idyllic. In the Prologue, the narrator moves past splendid homes with tidy lawns, sweeping driveways, and expensive cars. However, beneath the pastoral surfaces lies an unsettling and terrifying reality. In fact, the word “Ayles” comes from an Anglo-Saxon word that means combative and argumentative, which describes the Mertons better than Aylesford’s picturesque scene ever could.
In setting the murder mystery in the Hudson River Valley, the novel associates itself with a literary tradition that is almost as old as New York state itself. The Hudson River Valley is associated with lurid ghost stories, gothic tales of hauntings and supernatural phenomena. Tales set in the valley have long reflected supernatural intrusions, grisly murders, disturbing specters, and other inexplicable paranormal events. The area’s harsh expanse of woods, the steep hills of the Catskills, and the plethora of deep ravines have created a tradition of Halloween-strength spookiness. The folklore tales spun by the earliest Dutch settlers reflected their uneasy perception of the Indigenous cultures they had usurped, the lands they had stolen, and the Indigenous people themselves that they had wiped out. Beginning with the successful stories of Washington Irving—Ichabod Crane being chased by the Headless Hessian, Rip van Winkle and the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s long-dead crew—the Hudson River Valley has become synonymous with the creepy and the spooky, with ghosts who cannot find rest, and the malevolent spirits of the wronged, most often the murdered.
The novel taps into that tradition. The Hudson River Valley provides a fitting soundstage for the Mertons’ brutal killings at the hand of their own daughter. The novel does not venture into the eerie wilderness; instead, it peels back the veneer of class and civility from Brecken Hill. As beautiful as the suburbs seem, the families—as evidenced by the Mertons—are clearly unhappy, haunted, and dangerous, just like the valley they live in.
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