The Misfit of the FamilyIn more than ninety novels and novellas, Honor de Balzac (17991850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyzeas well as representa range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends