Home is where the heart is, or so the saying goes. But what happens when a family is forced out of the home in which they've left their heart? Or when a new family moves into a house that never quite feels like home?
In Andrea Uptmor's The New People, newlyweds Emma and Rachel have relocated from Chicago to small-town Riverbend, Ind., pursuing a tenure-track professorship for Rachel while Emma recovers, emotionally and physically, from a recent miscarriage. Coming to the small college town on the heels of the 2008 housing crisis, Emma and Rachel find that their city budget affords them an entire house: a small picturesque Cape Cod. But what looks like perfection on the surface turns out to be a poorly executed flip--a theme that becomes recurrent in their experiences as the two struggle to find their way as an openly gay couple in a conservative-leaning town. Between the emotional angst of a stalled writing career and the physical challenges of IVF, it's easy enough for Emma to chalk up the odd and inexplicable occurrences in the house--a leaky washing machine, a flipped breaker, a splash of orange juice on the floor--to shoddy construction and her own fatigue. But the reality is far more concerning: Charlotte and Dirk, the former homeowners, are secretly living in the attic. The arrangement is only temporary, the aging couple having been displaced by foreclosure and left with nowhere else to go. "The four of them were simply sharing a waiting room," Charlotte reasons to herself, "their lives suspended until someone's name was called."
In The New People, Uptmor moves through examinations of privilege and identity, extraction and gentrification, politics and parenthood, holding it all with a delicate sense of emotion that keeps this debut from ever veering into the territory of diatribe. Instead, Uptmor successfully balances the tender and intimate revelations about these two couples, worlds apart and yet sharing the same roof over their heads, with a sharp sense of humor and wry insights into the many ways the myth of the American Dream leaves victims in its wake. The New People is a carefully crafted story of what makes a house a home: the people that share it, to be sure, but also the community built (or not) around it and the many marks left, both good and bad, on the spaces inhabited. --Kerry McHugh, Textus Collective
Shelf Talker: Newlyweds move into a house, unaware that the former owners are living in the attic, in Andrea Uptmore's The New People, a story with a sharp sense of humor and wry insights into the American Dream.