"There were things that Jim would have taken out of his bags, if it had been possible," Jim's first section begins. Jim's affair, meanwhile, is remembered in fragmented recollections that at first take the reader by surprise and then unfold in a naturalistic fashion. Franny, in shock, has thrown herself into her habitual New Yorker's efficiency, considering career and romantic options that don't really address her pain. Jim and Franny's crisis, for example, is depicted quite realistically. Told from the loosely alternating points of view of the family members and the gay couple, Charles and Lawrence, who have accompanied them, it is something a little bigger, more honest and humane than the usual summer fare. This is hardly the stuff of a beach read. Too stunned to do anything about their planned vacation, the family heads off to Majorca with very low expectations. Daughter Sylvia has just graduated from high school with a first heartbreak, and son Bobby has shown up with the older girlfriend nobody likes and his own dark secrets in tow. Husband Jim has cheated on wife Franny after 35 years of marriage and been fired from his longtime job as a result. Her latest novel, "The Vacationers," opens with the unpromising gambit of a messed-up family about to head out on two weeks of enforced closeness. Emma Straub puts the fun back in dysfunction.
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