The Red House: Can This Famiy Be Salvaged?

 

 

THE RED HOUSE (2012)

By Mark Haddon

Doubleday, 264 pages.

★★★★

 

You might recognize the name Mark Haddon as the author of the brilliant book and play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The Red House is what he wrote next. It’s not quite the masterpiece of Dog in the Night-Time, but it’s an intriguing novel. Once again Haddon investigates both spoken and perceived thoughts.

 

The Red House follows the trials of an estranged brother and sister who reconnoiter at their mother’s funeral. Based on that sad gathering, eldest brother Richard, an upwardly mobile doctor rents a cottage in Herefordshire on the Welsh border near Hay-on-Wye. The idea is to repair family ties over the course of a week. Good luck with that, as the two families are like chalk and cheese. Richard, a divorcee, has recently remarried. Along with his sexy wife, Louisa, he inherits a stepdaughter, Melissa, a spoiled flirtatious 16 year-old. She’s like something out of Mean Girls.

 

Richard’s sister, Angela, is married to Dominic who has recently lost his job and has been reduced to a sales position at Waterstones (a British bookstore chain). His economic tumble reduces his family to downwardly mobile members of the upper lower class. Angela was once a looker, but after four births she’s on the chunky side, which is nothing compared to being seriously depressed since she lost a stillborn daughter 18 years earlier and can’t shake her blues. Their three living children are 17-year-old Alex, who is part good guy and part horny high schooler; Daisy, 16, who has fallen in with a fundamentalist Christian group; and adorable, but detached, eight-year-old Benji, who often disappears into fantasies and fantasy games.

 

Needless to say, the class divide comes into play, symbolized by the gap between Richard’s shiny Mercedes and Dominic’s old family clunker that he hopes will make it to Herefordshire. On a deeper level, Richard assumes a leadership role as he’s paying for the vacation, though he’s blind and deaf to Dominic’s feelings of inferiority. When the two attempt to bond over beer and outdoor grilling, Richard mainly sees Dominic as a “bloke,” which isn’t a good thing. Dominic thinks Richard is an ineffectual father to Melissa and he is. Melissa is as difficult as she can be, a vocal vegetarian, a foul-mouthed kid, selfish, and prone to doing whatever she wants whenever she wishes. In like fashion, though, everyone thinks Daisy has been brainwashed.

 

It is, nonetheless, a revelatory week. When push comes to shove, each of the characters becomes aware of which of their impulses sustains them and which are destructive. Richard, for example, discovers that he needs to build a relationship with Louisa rather than merely being bedazzled by her looks. The fact that Dominic seems to be flirting with Louisa is one reason, but he also realizes that having a mistress on the side means he can’t be fully in a relationship with his wife. That might seem obvious, but each character in his or her own way needs to learn to be more mature. Daisy has a sexuality crisis of faith and her mother begins to see her children for who they are rather than Karen, the lost child.

 

One of the triumphs of The Red House is Haddon’s skill in giving personalities to each of his eight major characters, no easy feat in a relatively short novel. To elaborate on the aforementioned use of spoken and perceived thoughts, most of the latter are as if we are inside mind bubbles that quite often illumine what they really think and feel rather than what they carefully say. (For Melissa, it’s the opposite!)

 

I will caution, though, that Haddon’s writing style requires some adjustment time. This is not a novel in which the author signposts who is talking or thinking. Haddon relies on his readers to get to know the characters until they can infer who is talking or contemplating. Benji is the easiest to translate. As precocious as he is, he still inhabits an eight-year old’s world, one that’s a mix of amusing imagination and verbalized fears. It will take you a bit longer with the adult characters, but because each metaphorically has a unique worldview, you’ll catch on. This is my way of saying don’t toss the book aside after 50 or so pages because you feel lost; you are actually feeling the way each character feels. You might even feel sorry for Melissa instead of wanting to slap her!

 

Rob Weir