In The Household Spirit, Tod Wodicka (All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well) writes again of Queens Falls, a remote community in upstate New York. The novel focuses on two adults--strangers, lost souls--who have long lived adjacent to each other in the only two houses for miles on a remote stretch of Route 29, "a twisted old country road" that serves as an auxiliary pass-through. Their houses were twins--"once identical, now fraternal"--built in the 1860s, when paper mills were the boon of the region.
In the house with original wood siding lives Howie Jeffries, a morbidly shy, divorced 50-year-old. Howie's wife left him 20 years before, and he has lost touch with his daughter, Harriet, a free-spirited young woman pursuing an art career in New York City. After two decades of living on his own, Howie still considers the residence "his family's house."
Emily Phane grew up in the aluminum-sided home adjacent to Howie's. Now 24 and struggling to cope with, and conceal, a debilitating condition that makes her too terrified to sleep, Emily is summoned home from college to care for the doting grandfather who raised her after he suffers a stroke.
Finely nuanced details and multi-layered dark comedy are Wodicka's strong suits. Howie's and Emily's alternating viewpoints reveal their vulnerabilities and enrich their well-drawn characterizations in a poignant, revelatory story of the liberating nature of truth and friendship. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines