Family Night

In her fiction debut, Flook, the author of two poetry collections, produces finely wrought sentences, but her story falls flat. Heroine Margaret has, as the title implies, a dark relationship with her family, a tangle of step-siblings and ex-spouses. She also has a boyfriend named Tracy, a member of Sex Anonymous who engages in various forms of sexual congress with Margaret in full view of her relatives and ultimately prods her into committing incest with her stepbrother Cam. At Tracy's instigation, Margaret, Cam and Tracy seek out Cam's father, whom Cam has never met and of whom Cam knows only that he was once a model for Arrow Collars. Flook's style is frequently arresting; describing a car speeding dangerously through lanes of traffic, she writes: ``It was a reverse wake, a terrible seam ripping upwards.'' But her version of the family romance--a catalogue of wayward deeds, odd sexual encounters, ugly secrets and uglier psychodramas--is more exhibitionistic than revelatory, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share her brittle characters' overwhelming interest in themselves. (Jan.)