Of Dishonor

Multi-generational family sagas have been around nearly as long as novels themselves. In relatively more recent times, novels such as Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, and Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits have employed fiction to dissect the morals, malice, and machinations of families. These tales have proven to be mother’s milk for hungry readers. Whether it depicts the blurring of bloodlines or the crumbling of dynasties, readers simply can’t seem to get enough of dysfunction and disintegration within the family unit.

There is an enormous amount of family upheaval for satiated bookworms to feast on in Mel Month’s novel, Of Dishonor: A Look into the Heart of Man. This sweeping account of the Winston, Harkin, and Dubois families contains enough familial cataclysms to fill the hold of the Titanic. Epic in both length and scope, it traces the fortunes of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, siblings, grandparents, and grandchildren tossed by tumultuous seas not only of fate, but also of their own doing.

Set in contemporary times, a legend unfolds of rich and powerful people whose wealth and position enable them to fulfill virtually every desire, yet whose very human failings keep them from achieving complete contentment. At the core of those failings, as the author alludes to in the title, is dishonor. Husbands cheat on wives, wives cheat with each other, businesses lie to affect public opinion that will redound to their benefit, public servants defraud the very governments and publics they serve, double-dealing, duplicity, betrayal and treachery take root and grow among the family trees while innocent bystanders frequently wind up being capsized in each clan’s wake.

Month spices his multi-layered narrative with detailed descriptions of erotic sexual encounters, plus suspenseful sequences of terrorism, political assassination, accidental death, murder and more. There are enough exciting and unusual events going on in this novel to fill multiple volumes, and they probably should have.

Just as many of the principals in Of Dishonor fail to curb their appetite for excess, so too does the author. His style often overwhelms his story. Ongoing use of the present tense eclipses its ability to maintain interest. No cliché goes unused. Dizzying switches in narration from talking about characters, to talking to characters, to having characters refer to themselves in the third person, make reading more cumbersome than it need be. Mr. Month’s familial tome is actually quite a tour-de-force in adventurous storytelling, however it fails to recognize that less is indeed more.