Joe Dunthorne offers a funny portait of communal living in his novel Wild Abandon

(Out: 1/3/12, 336p, Random House) Wild Abandon offers a fun, slightly satirical portrait of a commune in contemporary Wales. The commune, Blaen-y-Llyn, has been running for twenty years. But in the timeframe of the novel just about everyone is trying to get out of it. The only one trying to keep everything together is Don, one of the founders and self-appointed leader. He and the rest of his family are the focal characters of the book. Don is a bit pompous, still dedicated to the virtues of home schooling, sustainable housing, and living off the electrical grid, but his wife, Freya, has had just about enough of his bombastic personality. His 17-year-old daughter Kate, is dying for a chance to live in the normal world, and actually runs away from the commune to live with her boyfriend's family in a standard suburban house for a while, and his son Albert is enthralled with the idea, promulgated by one of the commune's residents, that the Mayans were right and that a cataclysmic event will happen in 2012, and that only those prepared for it will be able to survive. Young Albert wants to start preparing for that event, but mostly in ways that let him act out his anger at his sister's departure, which he experiences as an abandonment. We also get to know Patrick, the moneybags of the operation, whose former success in the greeting card business and as a landlord now mostly bankroll the commune's operation. But after years of smoking too much pot, he's become excessively paranoid. In one funny scene, he goes berserk, running through the commune, thinking everyone's about to kill him, and breaking his ankle in an attempt to escape. In the end, he too is trying to get away from Don and put an end to his decades-long pining for a woman, Janet, who's given him mixed signals through the years but never returned his love and devotion. Throughout the book, there are lots of interesting insights about communal living - Freya the wife, for example, takes on the role of the community's butcher because no one else on the farm where they live, including her husband, has the guts to slaughter their livestock. The only drawback, at least initially, is that there are few sympathetic characters with a real dilemma that makes you want to keep turning the pages. At the outset, it's perfectly understandable why everyone wants to escape Don - he's controlling and full of himself. But, ironically, over the pages, Don becomes the most sympathetic character. His wife and daughter's attempts to separate are somewhat cruel and unfeeling, and over the course of the marvelous closing pages, when Don throws a blow-out party, hoping to lure everyone back, his attempts to win everyone over and then control his young son, Albert, who's gone a little crazy over this end-of-the-world idea and the separation from his sister, make Don the character you root for the most.