I just started reading a novel made up of short stories (or "fiction collection") by the poet Alice Fulton and I can already tell it is going to be very good. Titled "The Nightingales of Troy", it concerns the family Garrahan over the course of a century (the names aren't all Garrahan because it concerns the female members of each succeeding generation). Seems like any novel written by a poet is going to be a good bet. "Pictures from an Institution" by Randall Jarrell is one of my top five funniest books of all time.

Another overlooked book; "Wickford Point", by J.P. Marquand, author of "The Late George Apley" and the Mr. Moto mystery series. This concerns another old New England family of the Apley sort but much more eccentric --their claim to the intellectual aristocracy is that the founder of the family was a fairly undistinguished Transcendentalist on his own but He Knew Thoreau. The central female personality is Bella Brill, characterised as "the champion cigarette bummer of all time".