Family drama, dark humor reside in ‘The Red House’
Eight relatives, stuck with one another on an eight-day holiday in the English countryside, offer plenty of drama in Mark Haddon's third novel, The Red House. Haddon achieved international acclaim with his brilliant 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and had mixed results with his follow-up, A Spot of Bother.
This time, with his simple setup, Haddon delivers a story of remarkable complexity, exploring the rich interior lives of his characters. He's equally attentive to his teenage characters and those trapped in midlife. Most impressive is the ambitious structure of this novel: The characters' viewpoints shift not by chapter (a familiar stylistic device), but on every page, paragraph by paragraph.
Each voice flows into the other, one person to the next. You can almost feel a camera hovering above them, zooming in and cutting away.
The cast includes Richard, a wealthy Edinburgh radiologist; his second wife, Louisa (whom he has married only months earlier); and her daughter, Melissa. Then there's his estranged sister, Angela; her husband, Dominic; their teenagers, Alex and Daisy; and 8-year-old Benjy, who's prone to existential ruminations: "You look up at the sky at night and it's beautiful but it's terrifying, too," he tells Daisy. "Don't you think that?"
Richard and Angela's mother died just six weeks earlier, and Richard attempts to reconcile with his sister by inviting her family on a week-long holiday in a farmhouse near the Welsh border.
The issues of this dysfunctional clan spill out almost immediately: Dominic has been cheating on Angela, though he vows to himself that he'll "make the family work again, be a real father." Richard is facing a serious inquiry that could jeopardize his job and reputation. Louisa has a somewhat scandalous past and worries that if Richard learns the truth, he'll judge her for it. Melissa, who's prone to bullying at school, is on the verge of being expelled. She's a typically confused and angry teenager. At one point, she compares her life to a china plate, only "there are too many fragments and they're too tiny and they don't match."
Angela, still grieving over her mother, is also haunted by the stillborn child she had years ago, a daughter who would have turned 18 the week of the family's vacation. Meanwhile, young Alex lusts for both Melissa and her mother — right in front of his uncle. And Daisy, who has become devoutly religious, may be sexually confused as well.
All of this adds up to arguments, deceptions, stilted conversations and hoarded resentments. There's an abundance of dark humor, too.
It may seem as if Haddon is juggling too many plot strands in The Red House, but he isn't. The story moves along swiftly and seamlessly. And although it would be misleading to suggest that these damaged characters are entirely free of baggage by the novel's end, life goes on — a bit calmer now — and each of them departs with a lighter load than they came with.
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Carmela Ciuraru is the author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms.