Family Happiness

The Solo-Millers are complacently wealthy, inevitably good-looking, and eccentrically old-fashioned. Are they paragons of good behavior and high standards? Or are they smug monsters? And is Polly, the tireless mom who is at once their most loyal exemplar and their most oppressed subject, an admirable heroine or as deluded and selfish as the rest? To me, late to the party for this much-beloved chronicler of Upper East Side Manhattan, the finest of the many pleasures Colwin offers is her combination of withering judgment—any narrator who refers to one of her characters on the second page as a "lout" has me hooked—and open-minded uncertainty. I'm still not even sure if her title is ironic or sincere!