"Keeping the House" by Ellen Baker

Sorry for the long lapse there in posting. I was in Vegas for work for a few days, and before that... I think I kept hoping I would finish my current book so that I could review it. But I am still reading it (never a good sign), and so the blog was fallow for a week.

Today's book is a Booksense pick from September 2007. It's called Keeping the House, by Ellen Baker. According to Amazon:

Baker's first novel is a long and uneven multigeneration family saga set in small town Wisconsin. In 1896, Wilma comes to the rough backwoods town of Pine Rapids as the alarmed new bride of a lumber baron's first son, John Mickelson. Wilma is already regretting her jump from college to matrimony when she gets off the train and promptly falls in love: first with her brother-in-law, Gust, and then with the beautiful home on a hill that is now hers. Counterpointing Wilma's unhappy trial by marriage and motherhood is a complementary story set in 1950, when another new bride comes to Pine Bluff. Unlike Wilma, Dolly Magnuson married the man she wanted desperately. Unable to conceive, she is determined to be the perfect housewife, a plan that morphs into an obsession with the old Mickelson house, now unlived in and uncared for. The novel expands to encompass the stories of the grown Mickelson children: as Dolly begins taking care of the house, and the Mickelsons begin entering and exiting it by way of a window. Stuffed to bursting with stories of love, loss, revenge, obsession, emotional and physical violence, and general familial mayhem, Baker's book makes readers work to sort out the fates of the most engaging characters.

Reader reviews on Amazon are very positive. My guess is: this isn't necessarily great literature, but it's a satisfying read.

From the Phildelphia Inquirer via PopMatters:

Baker has done a fine job of setting up the two narratives that first develop separately, like pieces of a quilt, and then are sewn together, part of the same fabric in the end. Her knowledge of American cultural history serves her extremely well. For example, Dolly’s chapters begin with quotes from domestic manuals of the era, such as this from a 1950 Ladies’ Home Journal article, “Making Marriage Work”:

“Married happiness can never be taken for granted. ... You expect your husband to continue his efforts to advance in his field; similarly you should continue your efforts to improve in your job as housekeeper, mother, and wife.” ...

Ellen Baker’s expertise as a former curator of a World War II museum permeates the novel. Her knowledge of the lives the soldiers led in the Pacific and European theaters is pitch-perfect. ...

Baker shows us two generations of American men mentally battered by war. Those who didn’t lose limbs or lives in one of the two world wars lost something else and, inevitably, they brought their losses back with them. She also knows what life was like for the women left at home, the grieving widows and mothers, the nurses who treated the damaged men and perhaps understood them better than anyone else.

Paradoxically, the archival data underpinning this novel is so rich that the family saga of the Mickelsons is sometimes stretched thin across the cultural background of the era. The family secrets are shocking, but so much historical material interlards them that they don’t pack the punch they might have in a shorter, tighter narrative.

Despite that caveat, Baker has scored a victory with Keeping the House. For all its length, it flows smoothly, and the prose is so assured, it’s difficult to believe this is the author’s first novel. Baker’s future as a fiction writer looks promising—as prosperous as the halcyon decades that followed World War II in America.

Anyone read this?

Comments

[melanie]

I got caught up in this one until about halfway through. It wasn't great lit - you're right. But it was okay. My main issue was that it was plain too long. Entertaining, but not 500+ pages worth.