A Fascinating Exploration of a Family’s Secrets Courtesy of Mark Haddon

Best known for his best-selling “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Mark Haddon offers a fascinating, often compelling, exploration of an extended family’s secrets in “The Red House”, which, stylistically, owes more to British writers such as Ian McEwen than to American ones such as Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody and Tom Perrotta. This comparison is most apt since the novel occurs over a span of a week in the vacation home of a wealthy doctor, Richard, somewhere in the English countryside. In the span of that week, two families become one; the families of Richard and his estranged sister, Angela, in which we see vividly via Haddon’s sharply written, terse prose, the inner demons and aspirations of both families laid bare, replete with ample resentment and guilt.

Haddon offers readers a most relentless narrative with occasional references to contemporary culture (e. g. Coca-Cola, Harry Potter novels), replete with lyrical passages emphasizing the active tense of his language via declarative sentences such as these:

“Dirty orange streetlights in the not-yet-dawn as she walks across the wet black tarmac of the Whelan Centre car park. Wet air and the clang of lockers, the flash of a blue verruca sock, pound in the slot, slam shut, key hand twisted out. She walks through the footbath into the hard white light of the pool, pushing her hair up into the rubber swim hat and snapping it down over the ears. The shriek and whistle of that ringing echo. She spits into her goggles and licks the rubber seal before flipping the elastic over the back of her head and sitting the lenses just right over her eyes. She stands and stretches beside the stack of polystyrene floats, arms over her head, fingers laced, palms toward the ceiling. The black second hand ticks on the big white clock.”

I have no doubt “The Red House” will become an instant favorite amongst book club readers, eager to decipher the past histories and current motivations of each of Richard and Angela’s families. Haddon has rendered a most vivid fictional portrait of these families, transforming the mundane into situations often replete in suspense. Without question, “The Red House” must be viewed as among the more impressive novels published in 2012 and a worthy addition to Haddon’s oeuvre of literary fiction.