The DescendantsA Novel

An examination of the guts of generational and familial conflict

It may be hard for some to separate Matt King, the protagonist of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s tragicomic debut novel The Descendants, from George Clooney’s portrayal in the lauded 2011 film of the same name. Despite that, in the face of a constantly expanding emotional trauma, King, as interpreted by Jonathan Davis (the voice actor, not the KoRn frontman), has less of Clooney’s Midwestern pragmatism and more a sense of startled-sober shock.
With his vibrant, colorful wife Joanie lying brain-dead in a hospital after a boating accident, King discovers that he must, in fact, parent 10-year-old Scottie and her 17-year-old sister, Alex. Given their father’s obsession with work, and their mother’s preference to spend time at the marina rather than with her family, the King girls are in the full throes of a rage that originated long before Joanie’s accident. Alex is in an expensive drug and alcohol rehab (also known as boarding school); Scottie harasses classmates and takes full advantage of her obscenity-filled vocabulary.
But closure for the King family does not come easily. Joanie, it turns out, was unfaithful and planning to leave Matt. As Joanie’s life support is turned off, Matt takes the girls on a multi-island search for his wife’s lover, and tries to reconcile what, in their family, might have prompted both her infidelity and his daughters’ sense of entitlement.
Of Scottie and Alex’s generation, he says, “Our offspring have all decided to give up [...] they’ll do coke and smoke pot and take creative writing classes and laugh at us.” That may be what’s at the core of The Descendants: Matt’s inability to see that he and his wife, with their obsessive pursuits of their own dreams at the expense of their daughters, is really a function of that exact same sense of entitlement. Hemmings’s writing is clear and assured; her descriptions of Hawaii beautiful, but it is her examination of the guts of generational and familial conflict that gives The Descendants such humanity.