Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is Jessica Shattuck. She's the author of a first novel, The Hazards of Good Breeding.

It's published by Norton, and it's set in Concord, Massachusetts, and concerns largely the doings of the Dunlap

family who have been in the house they've been in for 274 years, barring a two-year stint during which

they were occupied by Scandinavians, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, a little more than two years.

Now, can you situate for me, I guess, in literary terms, the kind of family this is?

Is this a Henry James kind of family in previous years?

Yes, without, it's not a very intellectual family, though. It's a very old Boston

Yankee family, you know, the earliest members of which came over on the Mayflower, and it has,

the property that they live in is one that the patriarch thinks of very fondly because he remembers,

or he tries to remember back to his ancestors' days of fighting Indians off of it.

And it's a real old, somewhat history-obsessed family.

And the attitude of the narrator, who is none of the characters, is rather jaded toward

these figures.

They are seen as people who await their receding hairlines and their problems with masculinity.

It's a kind of jaundiced and soured view.

...