The story takes place in 1915 in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Jay Follet, an ordinary man approaching middle age, lives with his wife Mary and their two small children, Rufus, who is about six, and Catherine, who is almost four. One night he gets an anxious telephone call from his brother Ralph beckoning him to the bedside of their ailing father, who appears to be at death's door. Jay agrees to go, and in an excellent scene in which Mary makes breakfast for him before his departure, the reader gets a clear view of the kind of relationship they have. The alarm turns out to be a false one, but death is still in the cards: Returning home, Jay is killed in a car accident.
The rest of the novel demonstrates the sudden impact on Mary and her well-meaning family. Her aunt Hannah is the most helpful and the most sympathetic to her piety; her father is an agnostic who takes a practical view of things while her partially deaf mother listens through an ear trumpet; her brother Andrew tries to console her by explaining the relatively merciful circumstances of Jay's death with an interesting forensic reconstruction of the accident. Andrew is a cynic who seems to derive his personality from his father; he is quick to detect sanctimoniousness and sourly decries the priest who refuses to give the unbaptized Jay full burial rites. And, in regard to a difficult telephone conversation with Jay's inarticulate brother, he delivers the novel's best line: "Talking to that fool is like trying to put socks on an octopus."
The text of the novel is interspersed with sections relating the young Rufus's memories of growing up and perspective on his father's death, the seriousness and finality of which he is not quite old enough to understand. There are nostalgic scenes depicting days and nights on the Knoxville streets, his expectations of a "surprise" which turns out to be the birth of his younger sister, an epiphanous lesson on race relations from his black nurse Victoria, the torment and ridicule he suffers from older, bigger boys when he starts school, and, most piquant of all, a Charlie Chaplin film to which his father takes him.
Although religion plays a role, the novel is not filled with uplifting, hyperreligious cliches that try to find some higher purpose in the tragedy. Agee explores trauma and grief with the hard eye of a playwright, rendering his novel warm but not sentimental, melancholy but not depressing or humorless, melodramatic but not hysterical. "A Death in the Family" is as pure an elegy on the American family as any the previous century could conceive.
