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A review by bookishwendy
The Red House by Mark Haddon
3.0
*note* I received this book as a First Reads giveaway.
I appear to be in the minority as not (yet) having read any of Haddon's other books, but at least I'm spared having to compare this to Curious Incident. I approached this book with some trepidation, as I'm wary of dysfunctional family narratives. I'll have to disagree with Tolstoy and say that, after reading a lot of books, Unhappy Families all do start to sound the same...
That being said, I found myself unexpectedly drawn into this book, specifically the sections about teen siblings Daisy and Alex. This took a little while, since there are eight different viewpoint characters, and the narrative head-hops every few paragraphs (usually without warning or even names to signal into who's head you've hopped--be prepared to focus intently or to be lost and re-reading sections half a dozen times!) These paragraphs in turn are often interspersed with random excerpts from books the characters are reading, or inventories of a store, or, most confounding of all, bizarre omniscient pullbacks expounding on, literally, any topic under the sun. Perhaps I haven't given these artsy collage bits enough thought, but I could not draw any links between the collage materials and the story at hand: what value did they possibly bring to a story about two British families vacationing in Wales at the Red House? (Please leave a comment if you have ideas...I'd love to know). See page 131 for the most head-scratching example of this. The paragraph starts with: "Marja, Helmend. The sniper far back enough from the window to stop sun flaring on the rifle sight [fast forward to the middle of the paragraph] Cups and coins, the Juggler, the Traitor. Spearheads and farthingales smashed and scattered in the cities of the dead. The planet warming. Cadmium, arsenic, benzene. Baby, please. A ranch burns on the prairie...[fast forward a little more]...Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. A boy of twenty-three presses a button. Seven thousand miles away a Hellfire missile fizzes away from a Predator drone."
No, seriously, WHAT is going on here? What the heck was that for? Is one of the characters flipping through channels on TV? Is the author trying to make some Deep and Profound statement about the world going to hell in a hand-basket while a family quarrels over stupid things on a vacation in Wales? Or is he just trying to pad out a narrative to 250 pages using excerpts from his writing-exercise journal? I don't know. But I almost put the book down right there on page 131.
However, I'm glad I didn't. The three teenagers and the 7 year old boy were all well-realized, flawed, interesting characters who were alternately immature and the most mature inhabitants of Red House, and I wanted to see what happened to them. Daisy and Alex in particular had satisfying character arcs. Melissa was one of those maddeningly alluring, manipulative, and downright horrible pretty young things. And Ben was just...being Ben, and delightfully so. The four adults, on the other hand, were not very interesting and overall I found them all hard to like. They also had "typical dysfunctional adult problems" which are always carted out in literary stories like these: infidelity, trauma from abusive parents, more infidelity, trauma from abusive former spouses, suspected infidelity, and trauma from a long ago miscarriage. They weren't very likeable, their stories were not nearly as interesting as their children's were, and I found myself wishing that the adults' stories had been placed on the back-burner, giving the teens' stories more weight. Unlike the teens, too, the adults didn't seem to change, which could either be "true to life", or frustrating to a reader.
Overall, a quick (if not easy read), and worth it for the kids alone.
I appear to be in the minority as not (yet) having read any of Haddon's other books, but at least I'm spared having to compare this to Curious Incident. I approached this book with some trepidation, as I'm wary of dysfunctional family narratives. I'll have to disagree with Tolstoy and say that, after reading a lot of books, Unhappy Families all do start to sound the same...
That being said, I found myself unexpectedly drawn into this book, specifically the sections about teen siblings Daisy and Alex. This took a little while, since there are eight different viewpoint characters, and the narrative head-hops every few paragraphs (usually without warning or even names to signal into who's head you've hopped--be prepared to focus intently or to be lost and re-reading sections half a dozen times!) These paragraphs in turn are often interspersed with random excerpts from books the characters are reading, or inventories of a store, or, most confounding of all, bizarre omniscient pullbacks expounding on, literally, any topic under the sun. Perhaps I haven't given these artsy collage bits enough thought, but I could not draw any links between the collage materials and the story at hand: what value did they possibly bring to a story about two British families vacationing in Wales at the Red House? (Please leave a comment if you have ideas...I'd love to know). See page 131 for the most head-scratching example of this. The paragraph starts with: "Marja, Helmend. The sniper far back enough from the window to stop sun flaring on the rifle sight [fast forward to the middle of the paragraph] Cups and coins, the Juggler, the Traitor. Spearheads and farthingales smashed and scattered in the cities of the dead. The planet warming. Cadmium, arsenic, benzene. Baby, please. A ranch burns on the prairie...[fast forward a little more]...Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. A boy of twenty-three presses a button. Seven thousand miles away a Hellfire missile fizzes away from a Predator drone."
No, seriously, WHAT is going on here? What the heck was that for? Is one of the characters flipping through channels on TV? Is the author trying to make some Deep and Profound statement about the world going to hell in a hand-basket while a family quarrels over stupid things on a vacation in Wales? Or is he just trying to pad out a narrative to 250 pages using excerpts from his writing-exercise journal? I don't know. But I almost put the book down right there on page 131.
However, I'm glad I didn't. The three teenagers and the 7 year old boy were all well-realized, flawed, interesting characters who were alternately immature and the most mature inhabitants of Red House, and I wanted to see what happened to them. Daisy and Alex in particular had satisfying character arcs. Melissa was one of those maddeningly alluring, manipulative, and downright horrible pretty young things. And Ben was just...being Ben, and delightfully so. The four adults, on the other hand, were not very interesting and overall I found them all hard to like. They also had "typical dysfunctional adult problems" which are always carted out in literary stories like these: infidelity, trauma from abusive parents, more infidelity, trauma from abusive former spouses, suspected infidelity, and trauma from a long ago miscarriage. They weren't very likeable, their stories were not nearly as interesting as their children's were, and I found myself wishing that the adults' stories had been placed on the back-burner, giving the teens' stories more weight. Unlike the teens, too, the adults didn't seem to change, which could either be "true to life", or frustrating to a reader.
Overall, a quick (if not easy read), and worth it for the kids alone.