The Narrow House

I finished The Narrow House by Evelyn Scott today and I am very torn on how to write a review of it. On one hand it seemed almost shockingly real for its time period (1921), but on the other hand it's not easy to get through 221 pages when not one character is even likeable. And I mean this - I could barely stand to read about these people because they were so depressing, annoying, frustrating, horrible, and selfish. Two characters were nothing more than pitiful. I know this is "truth" through fiction and all that jazz, but I think I finally understand what one of my graduate professors was trying to tell me about making the reader feel like the situation has "hope."

Okay, first, a little bit about the novel. It is about a family, the Farleys (mother, father, son, daughter, son's wife and two - eventually three - children), who all live in a house together. I of all people know how crazy it is to live with as many people under one roof. So, I sympathize with them. The Narrow House is really a novel about emotions, though, and what our feelings toward each other turn into when we are forced to live in close quarters.

And this is the novel's strength - the unmitigated feelings one has toward loved ones when subjected to facing them daily. That was a lot of unnecessarily big words there. The novel is stark (imagery of nakedness pops up frequently) with regards to feelings: the need to be needed and the pain of feeling unneeded; the freedom of being unnoticed in the background, untethered to someone else's emotions; the terrible mixture of grief and guilt we feel when a loved one dies of a long illness, especially a stressful illness; the desire to live vicariously when the chance for one's own action has been lost; feelings of self-destruction. Most of these emotions aren't pretty.

And this brings me to the weakness of the novel - I spent these past few days waiting for even one character to change. The only thing that changes is that the Farleys begin to accept their circumstances, but they don't change them or even change their reactions to these circumstances. They accept their indifference, selfishness, and fear and continue to instill these not-so-wonderful qualities into the three children.

My graduate professor talked to me once about her theory that every story should have some glimmer of hope about the human race. I balked at the idea at the time, all talking my ideas of high-art and "reality" and blah...blah...blah. But not all situations come out hopeful at the end, right? Isn't fiction supposed to reflect the world at large? It turns out that this is true only to the extent that I don't want to come out of days of reading feeling depressed about my life and the world I live in. I want to stress that these characters were the most whiny, frustrating, unsympathizing characters in the history of my reading experience. I forced myself to continue reading in the "hope" that one of them would be redeemed in the end (particularly the little girl May). Nope. Nada. It reminds me of Kafka's immortal Metamorphosis in that I was so frustrated with the mother, father, and sister in Kafka's story but then the end...changed my mind and showed me their cruelty was necessary to save their own lives. The Narrow House? No change. No life saving. No.

I don't even know what grade to give it. I was extremely impressed by its naked emotion. But I know most readers will want to put it down, with good reason. I'm going to give it a solid C, maybe even a C+. I want to recommend it to others who will understand what a risk the novel is for its (and really any) time period. I'm just certain that it would be a forced reading.