FAMILY FICTIONS by Richard Hall (Penguin:...

FAMILY FICTIONS by Richard Hall (Penguin: $11). Hall’s engaging, embrangled novel focuses on the dirty little secrets hidden in the cupboards of a well-to-do family in postwar America. Caught in a desperate struggle with her rich, dictatorial mother-in-law and the nasty antisemitism that lurks within the manicured suburbs of upper-middle-class Long Island, Margaret Schanberg turns her back on her Jewish heritage and changes the family name to Shay. She joins the local Episcopal Church and befriends its most social members. But she soon discovers the past is not so easily erased. Her children, Harris and Mag, repay her in kind with their own secrets--homosexuality, financial misdeeds, marital problems--and their search for identity eventually leads them to reclaim the heritage Margaret disavowed.