Mark Haddon’s ‘The Red House,’ reviewed by Ron Charles
The children provide an even more unpredictable series of encounters during this week in the country. Haddon, who will turn 50 in September, knows exactly what it’s like to be a teen teetering on the edge of adulthood, aghast at one’s capacity to do real harm. Richard’s stepdaughter could so easily slip into a mean-girl cliche, but she suffers as much for her cruelty as anyone else. Angela’s 16-year-old daughter, meanwhile, is struggling to figure out whether her newfound Christian faith is genuine or just the self-righteous pose her mother thinks it is. (Could any revelation be worse than discovering your mother is right?) And you won’t make it through these pages without falling in love with the youngest child, 8-year-old Benjy, who frets about reincarnation and death and superpowers and poo.
But it’s Haddon’s peculiar structure that raises this family drama to something exceptional. He’s perfected a constantly shifting perspective that keeps our sympathies from taking root in any one of these characters. The novel is composed of very short segments — sometimes only a paragraph long — each of which captures what a different person is experiencing at that moment somewhere in the house.
(Doubleday) - ”The Red House: A Novel” by Mark Haddon.
I was tempted at first to regard this method as a stunt, a step beyond the brief craze for plural first-person narrators that we saw last year, and honestly, it’s a bit of work, particularly before you’ve got all eight people clearly in mind. But the voices are so distinct that once you can keep up, the effect is symphonic. Moving from sister to brother, to daughter to son, to adult to child; hearing their thoughts and reactions, secret fears and shameful desires, you capture an expansive vision of this family — of the way families work and don’t.
Some of the most ineffable segments take place in the middle of the night, during those dark hours that would fall between the chapters in most novels. We see characters getting into bed or dreaming or tiptoeing to the kitchen for a snack. It’s all in prose, but the effect is something like Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers,” a poetic reminder of life thrumming along even when everything appears still.
Haddon wends a careful path in this novel between the effervescent comedy of quirky families and the bitter tragedy of dysfunctional ones. Their week in Hay-on-Wye doesn’t make Richard and Angela best buds, but it doesn’t dissolve into acrimony either. Everyone leaves a little chastened, a little more understanding, a little relieved to be returning to the routines of home.
On second thought, maybe this is the novel you should pack for vacation.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
.JPG)
Loading...
Comments