Hello, you've made it to the back of the book, a podcast devoted to arts and culture.

I'm your host, Christopher Scalia, of the American Enterprise Institute.

Last summer, I wrote about great books that feature large families.

It was a fun project, and I discussed some well-known favorite works of fiction and non-fiction.

Pride and Prejudice, cheaper by the dozen,

as I lay dying. There were also some works that I seriously considered but had to omit for various

reasons, V.S. Naipaels, a house for Mr. Bisuess, Jessica Mitford's Huns and Rebels, Frank McCourt's

Angela's Ashes.

As I worked on the project, I noticed a couple of things.

First, there isn't much fiction about big families.

And second, a lot of what is out there is pretty bleak.

Yeah, having a lot of siblings and children carries some challenges,

but, speaking for myself, it's a pretty great experience overall. Yet Naipal, Faulkner, and others

show things in a different light. That's not a complaint, though. Their fiction certainly

didn't suffer from it. With his new novel, The Complex,

the Indian American author Karin Mahajan adds to the small canon of big families with the Chopra

family of Delhi India. The Chopra clan is full of selfish, manipulative, and disloyal people.

One character muses,

No one was friends in any family.

It was just another network of power masquerading as a nest of love.

And another character sees, quote,

the lives around him now as terrible tight cells of repression

...