Houses interest me. Not so much as aesthetic objects, though I am hardly immune to the pleasures of architecture—to grandeur, stark geometry, homeliness, or charm—but more as, well, containers of human life. In the hands of a good writer, setting serves as a virtual character. Like Robert Birnbaum, in a note to Tingle Alley last April, I am “drawn to stories in which place functions as a crucible for a compelling set of characters.”
The house is the crucible compressed. A text I sometimes use when teaching is Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. She says, “But the conflict in a fiction cannot be ‘over nothing,’ and as a writer you must search for the concrete external manifestations that are adequate to the inexpressive feeling.”
Few things are more concrete than a house. The windows, the roof, the ceiling, the floor (that 13” slant—what a gift), the white dishes, the blue carpet, the chipped vase, the pristine settee, the O’Keefe & Merritt stove, the claw foot bathtub, the toilet that runs, the birds that nest in the dryer vent, the marriage bed, the bunk bed, the crib and cradle. The walls, cracked, painted black, papered in hunting scenes, pounded on, leaned against and listened through, and the doorways, who and what they keep in or out.
Bonnie Friedman in Writing Past Dark says, “Before a thing can be a symbol it must be a thing. It must do its job as a thing in the world before and during and after you have projected all your meaning all over it.”
This morning I took a spin through the bookshelves, looking for novels where the house is an equal actor in the drama.
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
This house is so powerful that, in the end, everyone who wants it winds up dead or in jail.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The attic … enough said.
Independence Day by Richard Ford
There isn’t any single house here that stars, but real-estate agent (and former sportswriter) Frank Bascombe spends so much time trying to find a home for this one loopy couple that the prospects start to feel like homely girls at a dance, their backs against the wall.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
263 Prinsengracht, Amesterdam.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That rat-hole of an apartment where Raskolnikov dreams of murder and shivers with guilt.
San Remo Drive by Leslie Epstein
A Brentwood manse shelters Hollywood-style wealth, fame, failure, and, unexpectedly, innocence.
Troubles by J.G. Farrell
This house is a hotel on the coast of Ireland, but the family (and then some) lives in it, and so ...
A woefully incomplete list. Care to add a title?
I'd like to see a short story in which all the activity/conversation takes place on porches...
Posted by: Lickona | September 23, 2005 at 08:41 AM
Two Cheever stories: "Good-bye My Brother" and "The Day the Pig Fell in the Well."
And of course, Howard's End.
Posted by: Therese Eiben | September 23, 2005 at 12:15 PM
House of the Seven Gables.
And Little Women, Gone with the Wind, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Posted by: Ken | September 23, 2005 at 12:59 PM
Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier), of course, and Great Expectations (Dickens). I'd also add Brideshead Revisted (Evelyn Waugh). And a book in which the house-as-a-character idea is discussed, The Witching Hour (Anne Rice), also has its own house-as-a-character.
Posted by: Diana | September 23, 2005 at 01:15 PM
House of Leaves.
The Ray Bradbury story "There Will Come Soft Rains".
I think you could make the argument that Wuthering Heights is a novel about two houses, but that might be reaching a bit...
Posted by: Erin | September 23, 2005 at 03:21 PM
UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN!
Posted by: Anne | September 24, 2005 at 02:01 PM
I also immediately thought of Wuthering Heights, but in general terms the whole canon of Big House Literature is worth mentioning. In many of the works, notably in Elizabeth Bowen's books, the house is itself is an over-reaching symbol of the fading ascendancy. In Molly Keane's Good Behavour, the house seems to be as a big a player as the key characters, with all it's echoes of post-colonialism. Most recently, the unsettling 'school' in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go was an instrinsic part of the story's eeriness.
Posted by: Sinéad | September 25, 2005 at 06:37 AM
Love - Toni Morrison
Posted by: Andie | September 25, 2005 at 07:51 AM
Dodie Smith - I Capture the Castle
Colm Toibin - The Blackwater Lightship
All the Green Knowe books by Lucy Boston.
Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen, also Coonardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard. There would be a whole sub-genre of post-imperialist novels with houses as pretty important players. Not forgetting, of course, A House for Mr. Biswas.
Posted by: genevieve | September 26, 2005 at 06:02 AM
Fall of the House of Usher
Posted by: sm | September 26, 2005 at 05:06 PM
Don't forget Beloved, where the house is a character and essential to the novel's structure. Each of the three sections begins with a sentence capturing the house's mood.
Posted by: Andrew Scott | October 02, 2005 at 06:19 PM