A Good House

Rating:
Summary: spacious but intimate chronicle of a family's history
Review: Bonnie Burnard's luminescent debut novel, "A Good Home," traces the fifty-year history of a Canadian family whose qualities, conflicts and struggles ultimately attain universal symbolism and significance. Through realistic dialogue and acutely perceptive descriptions of the external environment and internal psychologies of the Chambers family, the author gracefully transforms our understanding of this "normal" family into one of deep appreciation and genuine compassion. "A Good Home" signals the introduction of a novelist who understands the ability of literature of inspire both appreciation of the art of writing and respect for the value of an examined life.

Burnard introduces us to characters who constantly struggle, grappling with either physical deformities or emotional bruises. Her characters are not tidy people, and the messes they make with their lives invariably embroil those they love. Once enmeshed with the compromises and tensions of family members, the characters yearn for coherence, not only in the family structure, but within their own selves. The members of the Chambers family, usually honorable and steadfast in their quest for integrity, nevertheless watch as dreams crumble, loves wane and children reach eleswhere for understanding and acceptance. The bruises and imperfections each member of the clan possesses ironically make them more perfect in the eyes of the reader.

This sense of believability, therefore, is the single greatest strength of this spacious, nearly-panoramic novel. The father, Bill, whose hand suffered permanent disfigurement during World War II, strives his entire life to create stability and permanence; he is rewarded with the premature death of his wife, Sylvia and the unexpected emergence of a truly admirable woman, Margaret, who becomes his second wife. The children, Paul, Patrick and Daphne, struggle mightily with the issues of identity, acceptance and marriage; their results are mixed and surprisingly different. Throughout, Ms. Burnard provides intricately detailed descriptions of home life, anchoring not only her characters, but her readers as well, in the sense of home which pervades her novel.

My only reservation with "A Good House" is its crowded nature. Like any home built for a nuclear family which unexpectedly is required to shelter more people than its initial design intended, the novel simply has too many people swimming through its layered plot. By the time Bill has become a great-grandfather, the reader almost needs a score-card to know who belongs to whom and how each is related to the other. Excessive numbers of chracters dulls rather than shines light on the themes and often diverts attention from the otherwise strong plot line.

Despite this minor irritant, "A Good House" is a wonderful, compelling exploration of the manifest dynamism and unexpected turmoil a truly vibrant family must encounter.

Rating:
Summary: A chronicler's narrative
Review: The debut novel by Bonnie Burnard caught me unawares, simply because whatever I had expected, I hadn't expected this. Set in a small Canadian town on the shores of Lake Huron, "A Good House" is a chronicler's narrative, a history of one large family, or rather a set of blood-interconnected families. Divided into chronologically ordered parts, the novel unveils the events from the family's life, just as it started, with scattered hints regarding previous generations, and then the overlapping histories of children chime in, their lives chronicles as decades pass, and they lose their childhood in favor of the dramas, joys and troubles of adulthood. We observe them from a distance, as they age, get married, divorce, die and get reborn in the generations two times removed. That distance is quite well-kept throughout the narrative, being the most prominent feature of the novel. In fact, despite the dialogues and first-person thoughts prickling our reader's mind from time to time, the narrative quickly comes back to the steady flow of description. Not even a third-person narrative that is, simply because the objects change like in a kaleidoscope, families fuse together, and there are no characters who are allowed any kind of introspection. Even Margaret, the backbone of the family, does not deserve anything more than a casual look, as if the author had decided to write a story about some imaginary town with equally imaginary family. The fact that this is work of fiction does not imply that the reader is not to feel engaged, to live with the characters, standing there, just beside them, silent and observant. Reading "A Good House", I did not have that feeling of being lost; at all times I was aware that I am reading a book, that not even the author could relate to her own characters. I am quite sure that was intended, but as intended as it might have been, I am even less sure that the final effect was anything to write home about. Whenever the new part of the book looks at us with the bold typeface, within the very first page, or two at the most, we learn that this or that happened in the meantime, a few of the characters have been removed to make place for twice as many. Indeed, it's a bit of a strain to keep track of the names, barely mentioned lives, bits and pieces of events. All of this contributes to the general feeling that "A Good House" is a chronicler's tale, written from the point of view of a very distant relative, omnipotent enough from technical point of view, but not quite as potent with respect to the structure. All this said, I admit I liked the novel enough, especially its softer edge, compared to contemporary American literature, as if Canadians were just a tad closer to Europe and its traditions. If you like family-oriented books, that's a very good book to spend some time with, but I doubt it will stand up to second reading.

Rating:
Summary: Only if you're due for a CAT scan
Review: This is a serious contendor for the most boring tome ever published. Why was it given a prestigious Canadian literary award? Burnard' research is faulty, her motivation unclear and she spends uncountable words describing things that don't contribute to the tale.

The story concerns a small minded, small family in a small town. Bill Chambers returns mutilated from World War II to Stonebrook, a community of five hundred houses. This little village maintains Anglican, Catholic and Unitarian churches [at least], a doctor [not likely], a funeral parlour [less likely] and a golf course [implausible]. Having married a pregnant Sylvia and sired three children, an "attack from the air" in the North Atlantic [highly unlikely] results in lost fingers. Why Chambers abandoned his family for war remains unexplained: "he just had to go." His return is mundane - in fact, the first major event is the installation of a town hall fire siren seven years later! The loss of fingers causes Bill to learn to be left handed. No further significance attaches [sorry!] to their loss. And things go on from there . . .

The Chambers children grow, attend school, get married, have more Chambers. Only one, Daphne, follows a more erratic path. Her jaw deformed from a childhood incident, she, predictably, remains single. Also predictably, Daphne exhibits the most intelligence in the family, hence the most independence. A school chum, Murray, flits about the Chambers' household, with predictable repercussions revealed to us, but not to the family. Something in Sylvia goes haywire, and, predictably, she expires. Her replacement, predictably, is the town's only mature single woman, whose link with the family is that she's Bill's bookkeeper.

Tired yet? Stiffen your patience. You have another 230 pages to go before arriving at the book's final word: "Yes.". To get there you must submit to extended descriptions of other houses. Yes, the buildings; their sttructure, trim, paint, yard flora and, finally, some people in them. Children graduate, enter uni [or not], have spats with parents or each other, wander off somewhere. By the time the grandchildren arrive, you're convinced that the best people to read this are those going for a CAT scan. The nurses want you relaxed for the procedure. The only stress this book offers is the perplexity from wondering why it was written. By Chapter 1963 [chapter titles are years, not numbers or words], you've forgotten this is an award winning book. Because you don't care.

Sex! I almost forgot the sex! That's pretty numbing also, although the women seem interested in it - a novelty in small town Ontario. One woman grows so inquisitive about sex that she conceives twice, producing bastard girls which seems to concern no-one in a town of five hundred homes. Bizarre, given the spacing of the births. Yet Burnard, in another display of inconsistency, has one teen-age couple copulating without protection for a whole school year without issue. Until they marry. Children arrive until the magic number three [per wife] is achieved. Further births are prevented, but how or why we never learn. Economics? Bedroom space?

Why was this book written? To expound on traditional family values? Given the number of divorces and re-marriages, plus Bill's quickly terminated grief, this seems unlikely. The advantages of small-town living? Perhaps, but Burnard offers no comparisons with urban life or other rural towns. There's a certain discomfort displayed by children who go off to uni, a feeling instantly shed on returning "home." Those who leave Stonebrook for places like Vancouver or Toronto are viewed as aberrant by "the family," but the attitude is only mildly expressed. In fact, there's not a shred of passion about anything in this book. Except sex, of course. Even that is, again, but lightly asserted.

Women's issues? Here, one suspects, is the crux of this book. Elsewhere, Burnard contends that: "As long as the most basic nurturing unit, a woman and child, appears among us, we will have use for the word family." Which pretty much explains it. The men are there for procreation and to provide the incomes keeping the "Good House" running. Men aren't a necessary part of the "family." Burnard's "family" in this book include an increasingly churlish father, an independent daughter and three "sons" [including the satellite Murray]. The men's chief role in the book is to introduce an increasing number of women, their successsive wives, into the story. As Bill grows more irascible with age, the family's focus increasingly comes to reside in the replacement mother, Margaret. In her view, the Chambers family is the stuff of legend, which Burnard has the face to endorse. With so many wives and children, the "family" has expanded to a clan. Thus the book's title is finally explained. We're not dealing with buildings, although Burnard's spent countless words describing them, but rather a small town aristocracy.

Why this is the stuff of a major literary award is elusive. No values are extolled - certainly not traditional ones. The reader is challenged only in the acceptance of many implausibilities.