THINGS THE GRANDCHILDREN SHOULD KNOW review by Andrew Harrison Word Magazine Eels singer Mark "E" Oliver Everett relates the intensely strange, sad, true story of his typically atypical American family - disconnected genius father; substance-abusing, doomed sister; burdened mother and no good son - with such spare, matter-of-fact clarity and pathos that I kept telling myself, "This guy is the new Kurt Vonnegut!" Then I finished it and looked at the back cover where it says, "The Kurt Vonnegut of rock - Rolling Stone". So it goes. Rock autobiographies are usually self-serving exercises in concealment and if anything E could be accused of myth-making in the other direction. The deaths of his family gave Eels their creative impetus; here he approaches their individual fates even more directly than in his often-harrowing songs. Is this just so much shroud-waving then? Actually, no. Lovingly written by a man not prone to emotional incontinence, funny and ultimately heartening in the face of events that would finish most people off, Things The Grandchildren Should Know shares less with a rock memoir than it does with the likes of The Corrections, Middlesex, and The Ice Storm. Like them, it's unexpectedly uplifting; I've never read a better book by a musician than this superior chronicle of suburban madness.