In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods tells the story of a newly married couple who take up a lonely existence in the title’s mythical location.In this blank and barren plot, far from the world they’ve known, they mean to start a family. But every pregnancy fails, and as their grief swells, the husband – a hot-tempered and impatient fisherman and trapper – attempts to prove his dominion in other ways, emptying both the lake and the woods of their many beasts. As the years pass, the wife changes, too; her powerful voice sings new objects into being, including a threatening moon hung above their house, its doomed weight already slowly falling, bending the now star-less sky. (jacket description)
- The cover, description, and strong of praise of this book drew me to it. The back of the book includes quotes such as “The story’s ferocity is matched by Matt Bell’s glorious sentences: sinuous and darkly magical, they are taproots of the strange.” and “This book, which will grip you in an otherworldly trance, reads like something divined from tea leaves or translated from a charcoal cipher on a cave wall”. Unfortunately, I didn’t get those feelings. The book fell short for me, though I can see where it would appeal to some. Not quite my type of mystical prose, though.
- The third page lets you know what you’re actually getting into. I read the paragraph quoted below, thought “Whoa wait did that actually just happen?” and had to go back to reread it. At that point I had to take a 24 hour break to reset my expectations for this book (despite all the clues, I thought it was going to be more like Gaiman or Valente).
-
Then no kiss at all, but something else, some compulsion that even then I knew was wrong but could not help, so strong was my sadness, so sudden my desire: Into my body I partook what my wife’s had rejected, and while she buried her face in the red ruin of our blankets I swallowed it whole – its ghost and its flesh small enough to have in my fist like an extra finger, to fit into my mouth like an extra tongue, to fit slide farther in without the use of teeth – and I imagined perhaps that I would succeed where she had failed, that my want for family could again give our child some home, some better body within which to grow. (6)
-
- When I tried to describe this scene to my Mom, I realized it sounds a lot crazier than it reads – “This guy eats his miscarried child and then he calls it the fingerling and it gives him bad ideas.” (Her response: “I don’t want to hear anymore about that book.”). The prose is, in some sense, very poetic. There’s a lot of dancing around actual actions.
- I felt a bit squirmy awkward at the beginning that the man is already so opposed to his wife. I hoped to their relationship when it was fresh and loving. The man is an unlikable character (which is usually neither here nor there but he was the dominant character out of just a few and I didn’t enjoy spending so much time in his head). I couldn’t get over his attitude towards his wife.
-
“I dug more holes, and because I could not dig a hole without wanting for something to put in it, for the first time I began to kill what I did not intend to use: In one hole I buried a muskrat and in another a rabbit and in another a wrench-necked goose, caught by my own hands after it squawked me away from its clutch of goslings, themselves doomed beneath my frustrated heels” (43).
- I seriously considered giving up around the halfway point. The man and the fingerling and their actions were beginning to bore me. Somehow, I persevered.
- I wondered how the story could fill a whole novel. I certainly got a short story/novella vibe from it. I still wondered that by the end.
- The atmosphere (and the endless cottage) brought to mind House of Leaves at times.
- The Bottom Line: Two stars for the prose that kept me reading (also driven by my curiosity of whether something more was going to happen), but I really should have DNF’d at that halfway point.
Leave a Reply