Friday, September 7, 2012

Review: The Red House

The Red House
By Mark Haddon
Doubleday June 2012
264 pages
From the library

The Red House: A Novel

Angela is invited to spend a week at a country house with her brother Richard. The siblings are not close, and hope that the week together will be a way for their families (and the siblings themselves) to strengthen relationships and healing old wounds. Angela brings her husband Dominic, teenagers Alex and Daisy, and their young son Benjy. Richard is accompanied by his new wife Louisa and her teenage daughter Melissa. Author Mark Haddon sets the stage for grand family drama, new discoveries and the pain of old secrets.

This is my first time reading a novel by Mark Haddon. I have had The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime on my to-read list for a long time. Someone wrote an intriguing review of Haddon’s new novel and I hopped into the queue at the library. I found Haddon’s style confusing and awkward. There are a lot of characters in the two families and each one gets some time. This means that by the time you are really interested in one, the perspective has changed. It often has multiple people's perspectives on the same page. Then Haddon is fond of throwing in excerpts from books, dreams, the past, and seemingly random ruminations. It can be confusing at times to figure out who the narrator is or what the stream of consciousness or book selection has to do with the story at large. The novel opens like this:

“Cooling towers and sewage farms. Frinstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-gray lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of stream about it, even now. Hogwarts and Adlestrop. The night mail crossing the border. Cheyenne sweeping down from the right. Delta blues from the boxcar. Somewhere, those secret points that might just switch and send you curving into a world of uniformed porters and great-aunts and summers at the lake.”

Ultimately, I found this novel to be disappointing. I don’t mind working to understand a book, but I was working hard and finding myself underwhelmed anyway. I found myself ambivalent about characters who seemed to take one step forward and two steps back. Each time I thought that they were making progress towards strengthening a bond or overcoming a personal flaw, they run right back to where they started. Nothing really seems to change for these people – the same ghosts they experienced before (sometimes literally) are the same ones leaving the red vacation house with them.

It often feels as if Haddon is just throwing literary tricks at the wall to see what sticks. There is so much going on here that it is difficult to figure out where to begin or what parts of the novel really matter. I wish that Haddon had used his pages to take his characters through growth and change instead of filling the pages with too many literary tricks. 

7 comments:

  1. I started this one last week after getting it from the library and ended up putting it down because there were others I was more interested in. It seemed like the standard: these people are married and all hate each other, and the family hates each other because they just do and it's all a bunch of hate and we're watching a train wreck. Yeah, so I wasn't that impressed and definitely didn't see it grabbing me. Bummer that it was a disappointment. I've heard that his first novel is really good so I'm still thinking I'll attempt it at some point.

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    1. Yes, there was so much train wreck! And then just when you thought they were about to get back on the tracks, they derailed once again. Sigh...
      I am also curious about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but I might hold off a while on that one.

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  2. I've been wondering about this book, glad you reviewed it. I like to think when I read, but not so much that my brain hurts! :)
    The Relentless Reader

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    1. I like to think too. In fact, in a very nerdy way, I enjoy wandering through a brainy book. But it was just that you couldn't figure out who was talking and no one changed. They started as jerks and ended in the same place. Characters are supposed to evolve within a book, right?

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  3. I am interested in this book because I liked The Curious Incident so much. It's a shame it was a bit of a disappointment. If I have to work hard to understand a book, the story and themes had better be worth it. ;-)

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    1. I've heard so many good things about The Curious Incident. I think I will give it a try anyway, despite my feelings about this book.

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  4. I really enjoyed his first two novels, but was a bit disappointed by this one too. I saw good things in it but overall not a favourite.

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