Weird things repeated in families,” Michelle Huneven writes in Bug Hollow. “Coincidence or pattern?” It’s a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum; which comes first? But in the case of Huneven’s sixth novel, the story begins with a coincidence: the tragic death of a young man. Patterns emerge from this event as the boy’s family, the Samuelsons, grieve and repair over 10 chapters spanning several decades.
Their story is presented through a kaleidoscope of perspectives—we are first introduced to the Samuelsons through the eyes of their youngest member (Sally, age eight)—and the effect is delightfully destabilizing. In Huneven’s world, the parents’ perspectives have no more weight or authority than those of their children. Bug Hollow tangles with the complexities of modern families, those in which traditional roles—father, mother, sister—don’t quite fit.
The novel opens in Altadena in the mid-1970s. Phil and Sibyl Samuelson’s son, Ellis, has flown the coop for the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he spends the summer before college living with Julia, his girlfriend, in a shingled house called Bug Hollow. When Ellis’s family come to visit—i.e., drag their son back home from the clutches of bohemian life—Sally connects with Julia, and the pair draw together with oil pastels in the Bug Hollow dining room. “You and me. We’ll be the artists in the family—agreed?” says Julia. Sally, Huneven writes, “has thought of this moment a thousand times since.” The narrative, while mostly trained to the present, occasionally jumps to the future through moments of foreshadowing like this one that are sometimes so obvious, it’s as though Huneven had highlighted them in neon yellow.
Ellis leaves Bug Hollow with his family and heads to college, where he drowns while swimming in a granite quarry. The Samuelsons collapse—perhaps best described by Katie, the older daughter: “It’s like God took a giant shit right in the middle of our house.” And then they rebuild—now, with the addition of Eva, Julia and Ellis’s daughter, born nine months after her father’s death. Phil and Sibyl adopt Eva, and she grows up with Sally and Katie as sisters, though both girls take on a parental role when Sibyl develops cancer and requires their care.
Confused by the family order? So are most people who meet the Samuelsons, which inspires Eva to write a song called “I’m My Own Aunt” (an homage to Willie Nelson’s cover of “I’m My Own Grandpa”).
Since my dad was now my brother
His daughter’d be my niece,
So as my father’s sister,
I’m an aunt to me!
As the cast navigate the unique circumstances, they’re thrown yet another curveball with the arrival of JP, Phil’s son via an extramarital affair, who discovers the identity of his biological father through a DNA test. With JP come his family, the Durands, who slowly merge with the Samuelsons too. “You lucked out with them,” Pilar, JP’s wife, tells him after a dinner with his new siblings Eva and Sally. “They could’ve been anybody.”
Huneven excels at painting the complicated dynamics within a ragtag family. She bound together another disparate group in her 2022 novel, Search, about a committee assigned to finding a new minister for a Unitarian Universalist congregation in East Los Angeles. The narrator, Dana Potowski, a middle-aged food writer (like Huneven herself, who was a longtime restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times), struggles to collaborate with fellow committee members, who each approach the assignment with their own self-interest (and baggage). The group patterns in each novel are uniquely dysfunctional. Reading Search feels like witnessing a heated jury deliberation aboard a pirate ship; Bug Hollow is a high school jazz band attempting to play in harmony.
But maintaining such a big cast of characters precludes presentation of each member’s emotional complexity; at times, Bug Hollow reads like a daily log, recounting events without giving them a meaning other than the one we’re able to cobble together for ourselves as bystanders to the family drama. For instance, we never fully grasp saintlike patriarch Phil Samuelson’s desire to have an affair. Nor do we come to understand his wife, Sibyl, and her compulsion to drink. (Though those two sentences, now that they’re written, suggest that the two could have something to do with each other.) Instead, the reader is propelled through the book on a journey to solve the jigsaw puzzle that is the Samuelson family.
Huneven’s most vivid writing emerges in a chapter that does little to progress the plot. In it, Sally spends a summer in the Sierras, where she rents a small house by a river and sews window treatments for customers. She falls into a torrid romance with a married man and makes friends with a couple who own a doughnut shop. Things end badly—Sally winds up single and, literally, stuck in a hole. But the summer is also so surreal that the memory of the romance stays with her into adulthood. Huneven writes, “She keeps this brief brightening, this rare, faint wash of love, as her own, small secret. Hardly worth mentioning. Ever treasured.” It’s notable that the most striking Samuelson portrait is produced away from the rest of the family. Though Huneven tries to extract each relative at various points in the book—Phil goes to the Middle East, Katie leaves for grad school—Sally is the only one seen operating independently.
Huneven wraps up the book at breakneck speed; the final scene occurs in 2016. The family is settled, in different ways, in the Altadena foothills. It’s a satisfying ending, though verging on too neat: almost everyone miraculously balancing careers with creative pursuits and children. Meanwhile, the reader has the terrible knowledge that, in nine years, the Samuelsons’ homes would likely have been destroyed in the 2025 Eaton Fire. But there’s no room for a Cassandra in a fictional world. The Samuelsons are left to be haunted by their future, and their past. Perhaps they should be allowed to enjoy their happy ending, for however long it lasts.•
Lydia Horne is the research director at Alta Journal. Her writing has appeared in Wired, Racquet Magazine, L.A. Taco, Hyperallergic, and other publications.
