Adrienne Brodeur’s debut novel ‘Little Monsters’ explores the unraveling of a family and its secrets on the Cape

It is no wonder, then, that Brodeur’s novel, “Little Monsters,” is defined by family secrets. (She detailed the circumstances of her mother’s affair in her brave 2019 memoir “Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me.”) Not just one, but a head-spinning number. This smart, page-flipping novel has more secrets than you could successfully hide from your Sunday school teacher.

Set in a beautifully evoked Cape Cod, in politically volatile 2016, the novel centers on the Gardner family. There’s Adam, the brilliant, but erratic, father; Ken, his Babbitt-like real estate developer son; and Abby, his artist daughter, whom he considers “a special snowflake of the highest order.”

A sympathetic character, Steph, a sensitive cop from South Boston, along with her intuitively wise wife and baby named Jonah, becomes central to the narrative’s push for truth.

Adam is a genius, and a genius creation of a character. A research scientist at the Cape Cod Institute of Oceanography, Adam studies humpback whales. But most of his discoveries occurred in the late 1970s, and he is fighting against being pushed to the professional margins. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Adam muses, after meeting with the young doctor who replaced his own of 30 years: “Was it too much to ask that the person evaluating his mental state have at least one gray hair on his head?”

Adam makes an executive decision to begin phasing out his lithium and calibrating his meds. He plans to manage his mania in order “to solve the puzzle of cetacean language” by his upcoming 70th birthday.

A month into his experiment, he feels omnipotent: “… unburdened by the mind-numbing effect of his meds, he had a remarkable facility with a broad and unexpected range of topics: Shaker furniture, Tibetan culture, black holes, Homer, string theory, you name it.”

Adam’s beloved wife, Emily, an architect, died of a pulmonary embolism shortly after giving birth to their daughter, Abby, when son Ken was just 3½. Adam had a couple of short-lived marriages after his wife’s death, but largely raised Abby and Ken alone.

And between his all-consuming work and his bouts of manic behavior, he left his kids alone a lot. He believed in a kind of benign neglect, which the children felt as plain old neglect.

Predictably, given his age at his mother’s death, Ken is the angrier and more confused of the two. Besides his real estate business, he’s plotting a run for Congress, and he considers his wife, Jenny, and their twin daughters “assets.”

An artist turned career wife and mother, as well as Abby’s best friend and former roommate at art school, the compelling Jenny is in it to win it, supporting her husband’s candidacy, but with a twist: “Ken might be in this for power, but she signed on for purpose.”

Both of Adam’s adult children have big gifts in the works for their father’s epic 70th. These gifts are not only presents, but objects that function as big reveals, each sibling vying for the attention they crave from their charismatic father. But as the late book critic John Leonard wrote in one of his newspaper columns: “Inside every gift box is an intimacy and a time bomb, a presumption and a curse.”

Ken’s gift is a hand-crafted miniature replica of the seven-figure condo in the retirement community for moneyed elders he is developing (shades of “Succession”), one that he has purchased for his dad’s later years. Although his father plans to leave his beloved Wellfleet home only “in a pine box,” Ken has a myopia induced by his own needs and ambitions.

Abby’s gift is a multilayered painting that discloses hidden images and meanings the longer it’s viewed. One of the images depicts a symbol of hope for the future; others, images of childhood troubles and trauma.

Like John Leonard’s “time bomb,” both gifts prove explosive at the gala event.

The strengths of this novel, and there are many, lie in the detailed writing about aquatic life, sea creatures, and the Cape Cod setting. Additionally, Adam’s bipolar-driven delusions of grandeur, and his internal rants at intimations of his mortality, are darkly funny and poignant.

But as troubling as the book’s family secrets are, the dynamics are too boiled down and oversimplified in the end. Still, with some winning characters and a page-turning plot — grounded in Brodeur’s love and knowledge of the Cape Cod where she grew up and lives part time when not in Cambridge — “Little Monsters” offers the pleasures of a smart, absorbing debut novel despite some clumsiness.

LITTLE MONSTERS

By Adrienne Brodeur

Avid Reader, 320 pages, $28

Jeffrey Ann Goudie is a freelance writer and book critic.