Some of my favourite books can be accurately described as “slow.” In fact, I so enjoy a character-based story that when I hear “nothing happens in this book,” it bumps it up my TBR. So, it was a surprise to me to find myself slogging through Housemates feeling like nothing was happening. If it wasn’t something I was reading for book club, I would have DNFed by the first extremely descriptive chapter.
It is worth saying, though, that plenty of readers in book club disagreed with me. I’d say it was a fairly even split of people who liked it, disliked it, and fell somewhere in the middle. This is a literary novel that reimagines the real-life artists Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, who were a couple writing and photographing “Changing New York” in the 1930s. In Housemates, Bernie and Leah are writing and photographing modern-day Philadelphia.
Bernie is a photographer specializing in large format film photography; her old-fashioned and precise process produces extremely detailed photographs. In my book club, another reader described the whole book as a large format photograph of 2020s America, which I think is accurate—whether that’s positive or negative depends on what you value in a reading experience.
For me, Housemates felt like hundreds of pages of someone trying to describe a photograph to you. There are so many details, especially visual ones, like what every mismatched chair in their shared kitchen looked like and where the empty yoghurt containers were kept. I don’t visualize much when I read, so I found this tedious, but other book club readers loved the level of detail.
Here’s one section describing a storefront, for example:
“Glass cases for donuts or hot dogs or sandwiches, a single booth with olive vinyl upholstery, racks of paperbacks on either side of the front door, a gumball machine empty of gumballs that blocked out the word—closed. Meaning the other side said open.”
This is also the first time I’ve read a book that starts “in media res” when there’s nothing particularly exciting happening. First, we meet our unnamed elderly narrator mourning her “housemate”—this couple seems to be a stand-in for the real Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, though her role in the novel is a little confusing, because she only pops up a few times. At this point, she sees Bernie and Leah as they are about to start their road trip together to document Philadelphia. From there, we backtrack to how Bernie and Leah got together. We don’t return to the road trip until about halfway through the book. To me, this backstory felt irrelevant; it’s a lot of Leah’s general malaise about her life.
While this is a character-focused book, I also felt like there was some distance from the main characters. Leah gets a little more detail—and I did like the fat representation, which is often described positively but the book also includes scenes of fatphobia and discrimination. Bernie, though, is overshadowed by her processing having been a star student for a creepy, predatory photography teacher whose reputation after his death has now been tarnished. I don’t feel like we get to know her much outside of that.
There are interesting elements to this book, like the comparison of the real-life queer artist couple to their equivalent today and the idea of housemates as a way to understand living in a politically divided U.S., but those ideas weren’t explored as much as I’d like.
If you’re looking for an extremely realistic novel about being a queer artist in modern-day America, I recommend picking this up. For me, though, it was too true to life and descriptive, which made it a struggle to get through. It did inspire some great book club discussions, though!
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