The Red House
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4.0 • 25 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"The novel's pleasure, there in spades, lies in Haddon's caustic wit, his pitch-perfect nailing of each of his characters, and in his absurdly concise descriptions of the most banal activities. . . . In providing it, Haddon proves himself, once again, to be a brilliant, modern observer and cataloguer of human vice and frailty." —National Post
The setup of Mark Haddon's brilliant new novel is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister, Angela, and her family to join his for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just remarried and acquired a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. All eight arrive with low expectations for a pleasant holiday. But because of Haddon's extraordinary narrative technique, the stories of these eight people are anything but familiar. Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, The Red House becomes a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly guarded secrets and illicit desires, all adding up to a portrait of contemporary family life that is bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) sets his sights on the modern social novel with a seriously dysfunctional family. Radiologist Richard, newly remarried to Louisa, who has something of a "footballer's wife" about her, hosts his resentful sister Angela and her family at his vacation home in the English countryside for the week. Both Richard's new wife, and her cold-blooded 16-year-old daughter, Melissa, arouse the attentions of Angela's teenage children: son Alex, and daughter Daisy, whose sexual curiosity might lead her to trouble. Angela's uninterested husband, Dominic; their youngest son, Benjy; and the lurking ghost of their stillborn child round out the family. But most of all there's the universe of media from books and iPods to DVDs and video games that fortifies everyone's private world; intrudes upon a week of misadventures, grudges, and unearthed secrets; and illuminates Haddon's busy approach to fairly sedate material, a choice that unfortunately makes the payoffs seldom worth the pages of scattershot perspective. Characters are well-drawn (especially regarding the marital tensions lurking below facades of relative bliss), but what emerges is typical without being revelatory, familiar without becoming painfully human. The tiresomely quirky Haddon misses the epochal timbre that Jonathan Franzen hit with Freedom, and his constantly distracted novel is rarely more than a distraction itself.
