Danny

In Lost in Place, Mark’s family is portrayed as a middle class type of family, there is a mother, a father with a decent job, and three kids. The way Mark looks at his family and the way the book makes his family out to be are two different things. The book explains them to be like what everybody would expect to see them like, but Mark knows his family well, and the way they are, his views are more comedic and cynical. For example, when Mark’s skull cap came into the mail, it was flimsy and grayish. He put it on in the bathroom mirror and his brother came in and made smart remarks; “My little Brother, Erich, two years younger than I am, happened to wander into the bathroom before I had worked this problem out and declared that I looked more like Ebenezer Scrooge than any of those bald guys on TV who wear dresses and kick people”. Reading that, I started to get the sibling rivalry vibe between the two, which is not a bad thing; it is just how brothers and sisters treat each other sometimes. And it was not only between the brothers, the relationship between him and all his other family members are the same way. It is a good relationship; there is no problem inside or outside the home of the family. And I must say that the author is dead on with his descriptions, because my family is almost the same way. I have two brothers as well, so I know exactly how Mark feels when he hears something like that. With that evidence I can conclude that Mark does have a good relationship with his family, and I feel that the author did a very well job of describing what it is really like in the home of Mark Salzman.