The Burning House
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"The Burning House is an achingly lovely novel about the things that bind us together in this life and the things that pull us apart. Paul Lisicky has an extraordinary gift for exploring emotional nuance and the rhythms of desire. With this book he yet again asserts himself as one of the select writers who continues to teach me about the complexities of the human heart."—Robert Olen Butler
The new house ate up every square foot of its lot. Copper roofing, copper flashing, copper downspouts: every last detail crying out, notice me, notice me, keep up with me. Exactly the kind of house Joan would have despised, with good reason.
In this captivating family saga, narrator Isidore Mirsky finds his close-knit family and community suddenly coming apart. Facing the illness of family members and the loss of homes in a recession-plagued urban town, he also contends with an overwhelming new desire—his feelings for his wife's sister. The Burning House finds its narrator at his most vulnerable, and explores what it means to be a good man amidst chaos.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder. Lisicky maintains a highly active schedule with readings and book signings, and connects with his readership through Facebook and his blog. He lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island, and teaches at New York University. A collection of short prose pieces, Unbuilt Projects, is forthcoming in 2012.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Lisicky's third outing, a vigorous, interior-driven narrative plays out within the tense, anticlimactic relationship among three people sharing an inherited house set on an exotic coastal lagoon. Isidore Mirsky, unemployed at 32 after an accident involving his truck, is a well-meaning jack-of-all-trades. He pumps up with weights, and he cleans the beautiful house that his very competent, lovely wife, Laura, has inherited from her recently deceased mother while Laura's younger sister, Joan, who lives with them, inhabits the laundry room and volunteers with a community group actively trying to bar the building of townhouses nearby. Simmering under Isidore's pungent impressions of himself his self-importance and aimlessness is his attraction to Joan, and his hot afternoon sex with a woman he meets in the supermarket parking lot, even though he declares his love for Laura (who exhibits strangely hysterical symptoms, perhaps having had a miscarriage). Isidore's looming sense of being a failure and his wife's being on to him ("I know your type," she assures him), fuel his yearning for the more fragile, flawed, unsure sister, yet the only thing these three unmoored characters share in the end is the flu. Lisicky (Famous Builder) is a beautiful and powerful writer; his prose has a palpable energy that demands close attention, but the subtle narrative is smothered by the story's constrained resolution.
