Matt Bell:There’s a glib answer possible here, where I just say, “Slowly,” and then leave it at that-but of course I’ll go on. Tell me how you found that and how you pulled it off so well. The first-person voice carries a mythic or timeless quality, and it’s sustained beautifully for hundreds of pages. He answered these questions via email in March.Īndrew Ervin: What impresses me the most about In the House is the immersive experience you’ve created. I’ve followed his career with awe and jealousy and more jealousy-he’s an amazing writer-and absolute respect. I ran into Bell again a year or so later outside of a hotel room during the MLA conference, where we were both applying for the same job. We met a few years ago at the Winter Wheat Literary Festival in Bowling Green, Ohio, where we were late to an event because we stopped in a dive bar for a drink with Kyle Minor. You just have to read it.īell is the also the author of a novella and a collection of stories. There’s also a bear that talks, sort of, and something menacing in the lake. Their efforts are complicated by a series of biological occurrences that make even the noisiest scenes in Eraserhead feel like an episode of Sesame Street. No plot summary can do this novel justice, so please let it suffice to say that a man and woman build a remote house where they plan to raise a family. But what Bell accomplishes here is something that doesn’t happen very often: he has invented an entirely new rhetoric of fiction and marked unique territory of his own. Of course, there’s a tremendous amount of fabulist fiction in our midst these days in fact, there’s so much of it right now that fabulism is beginning to taste a bit like the flavor of the month, a fad resulting from a natural and reasonable distrust of realism and a desire to return to pre-commercial methods of telling stories. It’s a novel that-as Borges wrote of Kafka-invents its own precursors. It’s impossible that anyone else could have written such a thing. In the House is impossible to categorize. Consider yourself warned: do not pick up this novel if you have other commitments that day.

I drew checkmarks and more checkmarks in the margins. It took over my life for any number of hours and it’s one I continue to go back to from time to time, surfing the pages for the many passages I underlined. and finished the book before going to sleep that night. “Before our first encounter with the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.” I picked it up one afternoon just to read the opening paragraph. Matt Bell’s visionary debut novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and Woods is one of the most singularly strange and beautiful and wondrous books to come along in a long time.

Last days brian evenson summary