A study in the meaning of family

A family assembles at its country house for a memorial to a lost son.

In the course of the long weekend, old and new tensions — between husbands and wives, between parents and children, and among siblings — bubble to the surface.

It could be the plot of a Chekhov play or a Woody Allen movie. But on the classic narrative scaffolding of The World Without You (Pantheon, 336 pages, $30) Joshua Henkin develops a painfully contemporary situation.

The youngest child and only son of the Frankel family, Leo, was killed in Iraq on July 4, 2004. On the first anniversary of his death, the family gathers for the unveiling of his tombstone.

The skill with which Henkin explores the points of view and personae of his ensemble cast is masterful.

From the aging, defeated patriarch to the innocent three-year-old (“More than once, he’s been asked by some unknowing soul where his father is, to which he has responded, cheerfully, “He’s dead!”), Henkin depicts each in terms of their response to loss, both its damage and its unfolding trajectory.

This was a central issue in the author’s well-received Matrimony as well.

Both novels explore with subtlety and feeling the meaning of family, both those we are born with and those we choose, those we leave behind and those with whom we soldier on.