From Our House: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: extraordinary memoir plumbs depths of abuse, anger, and love
Review: Written with extraordinary eloquence, elgance and honesty, Lee Martin's powerful memoir "From Our House" deserves a national reading audience. Revealing the horrible and enduring hurt regularly dished out by his angry and bereft father, the author journeys where few have the courage to go: to the depths of the human heart turned against itself, to the terrain where lives twisted by loss and regret recoil against each other, to the crooks and crannies of our soul where we try to forgive, to start anew, despite all evidence against hope. Whatever words of praise I write cannot begin to measure the profound respect I have for Lee Martin. This slender, compelling work will be recognized, I have no doubt, as a masterpiece, and Mr. Martin will be recognized as a skilled and compassionategeographer of how families can enter the darker regions of abuse.

Three characters dominate the narrative, which follows the life of the author from childhood through the ultimately redemptive acts of both father and son. Lee Martin interweaves his story with that of his mother, Beulah, and his father, Roy. The most poignant character is that of the mother, a woman who married very late in life and appeared to accept an existence of diminished possibiliites. Beulah emerges as an amazingly strong woman, whose faith and quiet optimism never flags in the midst of a household of anger and violence. Lee Martin describes her as "a woman of duty and endurance, selfless and without need, at least none she was willing to place before the obligation she felt toward her family." Earlier in her life, she battled against her father's alcoholism; her adult life would witness her constant attempts to broken a sense of peace between her enraged husband and alienated and terrified son. The author is acutely aware of her emotional exhaustion and the gnawing toll an abusive home exacted on her physical and spiritual life. Ultimately, if anyone triumphs in this memoir, it is she. Her quiet optimism, faith in the future and belief in the power of forgiveness transcend the violence, anger and mistrust which were the hallmarks of their home.

If Beulah symbolizes faith and redemption, Roy represents blasted hopes and unfettered violence. The author's evocative description of how his father lost his hands in a farming accident foreshadows the rage and sense of impotence that will become life's companions to his father. Roy regularly whips his son, and for those of us who have felt the anger of a father as expressed through whippings, Lee's understated pain permeates this novel. Yet, Roy is presented as a whole being. Lee knows his father is a "sensualist," whose passions for life were stripped from him by the accident. We can see Roy's jaws kneading in anger; we feel his hooks clamp into us when he grabbed his son by the throat; we know how he can use powerful words to sublimate the frustrations boiling underneath.

Yet, the son, Lee Martin, must be the focus of this memoir. We see him as a little boy, yearning for the caress and embrace of his father. Instead, "although he never really maimed me, he often left red marks on my skin, marks that faded more quickly than the heartache that filled me on those occasions." Lee senses that his family was skewed and recognized that difference in the other dysfunctional families he encountered in his childhood. He grows up with a sense of shame, both of his family and of his own apparent evil, for mustn't he by defintion deserve the abuse his father so unsparingly gives him. His family's move away from his rural origins brings only temporary relief to his family; Lee is an outcast, an outsider -- both in his new environment and in his own family. By his adolescence, Lee dallies with delinquency, involving himself in theft and arson. His eventual embracing of his mother's religious convictions provides the lever by which he may offset his own sense of existential anguish and family displacement.

Not only does the author carry the narrative with conviction and purpose, Lee Martin is an amazing writer. Each page is exquisitely crafted. His description of his childhood farm/home is Whitmanesque. As you read this novel, you will constantly comment at how hard this author has worked for you. Redolent with pain and anguish, "From Our House" instructs us in the manner of living.

Rating:
Summary: extraordinary memoir plumbs depths of abuse, anger, and love
Review: Written with extraordinary eloquence, elgance and honesty, Lee Martin's powerful memoir "From Our House" deserves a national reading audience. Revealing the horrible and enduring hurt regularly dished out by his angry and bereft father, the author journeys where few have the courage to go: to the depths of the human heart turned against itself, to the terrain where lives twisted by loss and regret recoil against each other, to the crooks and crannies of our soul where we try to forgive, to start anew, despite all evidence against hope. Whatever words of praise I write cannot begin to measure the profound respect I have for Lee Martin. This slender, compelling work will be recognized, I have no doubt, as a masterpiece, and Mr. Martin will be recognized as a skilled and compassionategeographer of how families can enter the darker regions of abuse.

Three characters dominate the narrative, which follows the life of the author from childhood through the ultimately redemptive acts of both father and son. Lee Martin interweaves his story with that of his mother, Beulah, and his father, Roy. The most poignant character is that of the mother, a woman who married very late in life and appeared to accept an existence of diminished possibiliites. Beulah emerges as an amazingly strong woman, whose faith and quiet optimism never flags in the midst of a household of anger and violence. Lee Martin describes her as "a woman of duty and endurance, selfless and without need, at least none she was willing to place before the obligation she felt toward her family." Earlier in her life, she battled against her father's alcoholism; her adult life would witness her constant attempts to broken a sense of peace between her enraged husband and alienated and terrified son. The author is acutely aware of her emotional exhaustion and the gnawing toll an abusive home exacted on her physical and spiritual life. Ultimately, if anyone triumphs in this memoir, it is she. Her quiet optimism, faith in the future and belief in the power of forgiveness transcend the violence, anger and mistrust which were the hallmarks of their home.

If Beulah symbolizes faith and redemption, Roy represents blasted hopes and unfettered violence. The author's evocative description of how his father lost his hands in a farming accident foreshadows the rage and sense of impotence that will become life's companions to his father. Roy regularly whips his son, and for those of us who have felt the anger of a father as expressed through whippings, Lee's understated pain permeates this novel. Yet, Roy is presented as a whole being. Lee knows his father is a "sensualist," whose passions for life were stripped from him by the accident. We can see Roy's jaws kneading in anger; we feel his hooks clamp into us when he grabbed his son by the throat; we know how he can use powerful words to sublimate the frustrations boiling underneath.

Yet, the son, Lee Martin, must be the focus of this memoir. We see him as a little boy, yearning for the caress and embrace of his father. Instead, "although he never really maimed me, he often left red marks on my skin, marks that faded more quickly than the heartache that filled me on those occasions." Lee senses that his family was skewed and recognized that difference in the other dysfunctional families he encountered in his childhood. He grows up with a sense of shame, both of his family and of his own apparent evil, for mustn't he by defintion deserve the abuse his father so unsparingly gives him. His family's move away from his rural origins brings only temporary relief to his family; Lee is an outcast, an outsider -- both in his new environment and in his own family. By his adolescence, Lee dallies with delinquency, involving himself in theft and arson. His eventual embracing of his mother's religious convictions provides the lever by which he may offset his own sense of existential anguish and family displacement.

Not only does the author carry the narrative with conviction and purpose, Lee Martin is an amazing writer. Each page is exquisitely crafted. His description of his childhood farm/home is Whitmanesque. As you read this novel, you will constantly comment at how hard this author has worked for you. Redolent with pain and anguish, "From Our House" instructs us in the manner of living.