Bonnie Burnard: A Good House

Doubleday

$34.95

Review: John McCrystal*

The word "house" in the title of this novel does not refer to a structure of bricks and mortar, although the book opens with a description of the small Canadian town Stonebrook, and within it the house belonging to the Chambers family. Rather, it uses the word to mean a family through its generations.

This is the story of Bill Chambers and his children by his first wife, Sylvia, and, after her death, his second, Margaret, from 1949 to the present.

Burnard writes of a journal in the story: "It had been written by a woman and the assumptions she made, the attention she paid, could not have been mistaken for anything but a woman's."

This is a fine example of a kind of fiction which is fashionable among women writers at the moment: character-driven novels with little in the way of structured plot; the closest comparison which springs to mind is Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.

A Good House, which last year won Canada's premier award for fiction, is full of the minutiae of ordinary lives: little triumphs, tragedies small and large, love in all its complex forms. Malice is absent and its dramatic place is supplied by its more familiar cousin, misunderstanding.

These are all good people more or less doing their best, and responding to the vicissitudes of their lives just as real people do.

It's not the stuff of high drama, but strangely enough that doesn't matter. The most striking thing about this book is that by pulling the focus in so tightly upon the mundane detail, the banality of ordinary lives, the reader becomes acutely aware of life itself, in the background and offscreen.

Like the young operator of the video camera at the wedding which closes the book, Burnard has a firm but unobtrusive directorial presence, managing shifts of point of view and time frame, without so much as a lurch or a jolt.

Such a novel stands or falls by the characterisation, and here it is flawless. There's nothing melodramatic, excessively stylised or overdone. It's a difficult style of novel to carry off, and I'm still not entirely sure how she manages it, but she does.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.