Assume The Position is about sex and you’d be perfectly right. If you’ve ever walked in on your parents in flagrante delicato, or thumbed through a copy of The Joy of Sex with its shaggy partners deep into the trip of lovemaking, and wondered how children of the sexual revolution feel about all that sexual flowering thirty years later, Meg Wolitzer’s seventh novel, out in paperback from Scribner, is one for tackling the subject with wit and poignancy. Wolitzer is an impressive novelist, a careful observer of the interstices of society and of family as she explores sexual politics, shame, and intimacy in two very different generations.

Thirty years after the publication of Paul and Roz Mellow’s best-selling 1975 sex book, “Pleasuring,” complete with illustrations, the Mellow family is scattered: an older brother on anti-depressants that blunt his sex drive, the lonely youngest girl attempting a documentary about a cherished Long Island elementary school, the older sister, a former drug addict and new mother in California, and the younger brother, a gay Republican in Rhode Island diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. The Mellow's divorce following the wake of the book's phenomenal success has left the family doubly exposed, adrift in degrees of dissatisfaction, repression, and disillusion. As each chapter chronicles present compromises and disappointments that tie them to the past (and, inevitably, to the shame, confusion, and embarrasment surrounding the public airing of their parents' sex life), Wolitzer’s unsparing exploration of how "the sounds of parents traveled through walls, traveled up stairs" is commanding and bittersweet. There seems to be a simmering adolescent inside most adult children, which Wolitzer manages alternately to indulge and to pull up short.

The suspense in the novel revolves around the re-issue of Pleasuring and the complicated rewards of letting go of old ways of thinking about the past. Let the most famous position in the Mellow's book, called “Electric Forgiveness,” provide a way of thinking about intimacy. When your parents stop being to blame, quit being the defining drama of all that has happened or will happen to you, you can look through the keyhole, open up and find a new way of embracing the long arm of the past.