![]() ![]() Flournoy’s writing style is unobtrusive and straightforward, evocative but not showy it shows confidence in its solid craftsmanship, without resorting to writerly furbelows. But it never feels sprawling, not even in the lush The House of the Spirits way that a good multigenerational epic can sometimes sprawl. The scope of The Turner House dwarfs the two-person idyll of Our Souls at Night: There are 13 Turner siblings, plus their parents and some of their children, and the action shuttles back and forth from 2008 to 1944. But these themes appear in much the same way they would appear in life: not overtly or self-consciously, but in the normal course of things, as part of the challenge of existing as a human in the world. In exploring the fate of the house, which may or may not be haunted, Flournoy takes on questions of fidelity, loyalty, trauma, addiction, race, poverty, generation gaps, responsibility, belief, and economic collapse. ![]() It’s a house they grew up in and loved, but it’s also a house that’s worth a fraction of what their mother owes. I mean, there are exceptions-various thrones, the Siege Perilous, that chair Clint Eastwood talked to-but I’ll just say that my metaphor is imperfect and leave it there.) Though The Turner House tells many stories, it is primarily about adult siblings trying to decide what to do about their family home on Detroit’s crumbling East Side. (The chair metaphor breaks down here chairs are rarely significant. It is also, rather subtly and quietly, significant. (My main complaint about the book was a light but glaring smattering of careless errors, things the copy editor should have easily caught if copy editing is still a thing.) But it’s comfortable, functional, beautiful, and inviting. It’s not precisely a “they don’t build them this way anymore” kind of heirloom piece-it’s built the way they build them now, with a few rough edges, some spots where the joins are a little askew. The Turner House, by contrast, is an armchair, an enormous, expansive, lived-in armchair, beautifully weathered, built to last. In the end, the story didn’t satisfy me, and the process of finding that out was simply uncomfortable. I found most people’s motivations either opaque, senseless, or both, and the lack of quote marks so needlessly obfuscatory and disruptive that I probably couldn’t have gotten into it anyway. But for me, it’s conspicuously lacking in warmth-a chair with no cushions, no upholstery, nothing to lean on. We are told what they do and say, but shown nothing of the why.īuy this special ToB Memo Book for $2 and Field Notes will match your $2 and donate $4 to 826 National, which provides free educational programs to under-resourced youth.Īgain, I can see how this would have a spartan appeal as a love story with no messy mucking around in the characters’ heads. Louis says “I don’t know” and then “what if I snore?” and then to himself he says “what in the hell” and “now don’t get ahead of yourself,” although he says all of these things without quotation marks, and then the next day he goes to the barber and has a shave and goes to Addie’s house and says “I’d like to come over tonight if that’s still all right.” The book goes on to describe the growing closeness between Addie and Louis, their histories, the difficult-to-fathom disapproval of their neighbors and families, but the reader’s window into their minds never opens further than it does in this first exchange. In the opening pages Addie approaches Louis, a neighbor, to ask whether he would like to start keeping her company at night-not, she’s quick to add, in a sexual way, though this doesn’t keep the neighbors from talking. The book concerns the late-life romance of Addie Moore and Louis Waters, both widowed and both around 70 years old. In the case of the chair that would be the back and arms for the book it’s quotation marks and solid characterization, both jarring omissions in a work that’s mainly dialogue. But it’s missing some essential elements of usability and comfort. ![]() It’s attractive, in a clean way, and you can easily imagine it adding austere grace to a Better Homes and Gardens spread that also features a pure white, mid-century modern sofa with a solid-color cashmere throw. Maybe even one depression for each buttock. I guess this is why I couldn’t stop thinking about these books in terms of chairs.Īs a chair, Our Souls at Night is a designer stool made out of a single block of bleached wood, with maybe a bit of a depression where you sit. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.” She lives in Brooklyn with all the other writers, and when not working spends most of her time aging, feeling terrible about aging, or frequently both. The Toast once said she was “on fire” but it turned out she was fine. Jess Zimmerman is a writer and editor who’s appeared in Hazlitt, the New Republic, the Guardian, The Hairpin, and others.
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