Home Making
A Novel
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- € 10,99
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- € 10,99
Beschrijving uitgever
"An intricate exploration of family and home, of mother and child, of friends, of women and written with both precision and style."—Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
From a talented, powerful new voice in fiction comes a stunning novel about the intersection of three lives coming to grips with identity, family legacy, and what it means to make a house a true home.
Cybil is a war child—the result of a brief affair between a young Japanese woman and a French soldier—who at a young age is transplanted to Tucson, Arizona, and raised by an American officer and his rigid wife. After a rebellious adolescence, she grows up to become a successful ob-gyn.
Chloe, Cybil’s daughter, is adrift in an empty house in the hills of Virginia. Her marriage has fallen apart, and her estranged husband is dying of cancer. Room by room, Chloe makes her new house into a home, grappling always with the real and imagined boundaries that limit her as a single, childless woman in contemporary America.
Beau, Chloe’s closest friend, is in love with a man he’s only met on the internet, who lives across the country. Shepherding Chloe through her grief, he is often called back to his loud, humid, chaotic childhood in Southwest Louisiana, where he first reckoned with the intricate ties between queerness, loneliness, and place.
Through each of these characters Matalone weaves a moving, beautiful narrative of home, identity, and belonging. Home Making is a somber, yet hopeful, ode to the stories we tell ourselves in order to make a family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rumpus columnist Matalone's heady, lyrical debut overlays an adopted woman's journey into motherhood with her daughter's story of making a home for herself as an adult. Born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and French father, Cybil is adopted by an American couple in Arizona in the 1950s and eventually has a daughter, Chloe, who, in the present, struggles to make a home out of a sprawling house she buys in Virginia while estranged from her husband, Pat, contrasting their old house with Le Corbusier's aphorism, "A house is a machine for living in" ("machines break, become defunct"). In spare chapters, Mantalone moves back and forth in time to trace the shapes of Cybil's and Chloe's identities through their relationships to domestic spaces. As Chloe wanders from dining room to kitchen to closet in her new house, she ruminates on the varied meanings of home, reflecting on her childhood and contemplating a future with her best friend, Beau, a gay man who glibly encourages her, "As the great sculpture of pirouetting steel, Richard Serra, said, space is material." In measured prose, Matalone draws out connections between past and present to illuminate the mother and daughter's shared sense of ambiguity toward motherhood. Matalone's cool reflections on art and architecture will appeal to fans of Chris Kraus.