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In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Matt Bell (Goodreads Author)

3.32 · Rating details · 1,409 ratings · 348 reviews

In this epic, mythical debut novel, a newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, to fish the lake, to trap the nearby woods, and build a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at ...more

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Hardcover, 312 pages

Published June 18th 2013 by Soho Press

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Apr 05, 2013 karen rated it really liked it

Shelves: free-from-work, netgalley

this book is beautiful and maddening. it is convoluted fabulism, sad and irrealy real.

the setting and the atmosphere are like a fairytale, like The Snow Child, but the truths it dissects: romantic relationships, parenthood, and regret, are real and dark dark dark.

if you don't have time to devote to it,though, don't bother. it's not a long book, so it's not like it is a real commitment you will have to be making, but i read this while in the middle of a million projects at work, and the language ...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Kris rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-releases, netgalley, fiction

I read this book as an ARC from Netgalley.

In In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Matt Bell has crafted a disturbing extended fable, in which he explores themes around marriage and parenthood, creation and destruction, and memory and aging. In haunting prose that echoes the cadences of oral tales and creation myths, he tells the story of a nameless couple who leave their families and friends after marrying and create a home for themselves in a quiet land, with a lake on one I read this book as an ARC from Netgalley.

In In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Matt Bell has crafted a disturbing extended fable, in which he explores themes around marriage and parenthood, creation and destruction, and memory and aging. In haunting prose that echoes the cadences of oral tales and creation myths, he tells the story of a nameless couple who leave their families and friends after marrying and create a home for themselves in a quiet land, with a lake on one side of their house and woods on the other. The couple longs for children to make their family complete, but their efforts lead to a series of heartbreaking complications and misunderstandings, exacerbated by the husband's perplexity over his wife's seemingly magical powers of creation. I hesitate to tell more about the plot, such as it is, for fear of spoilers, but I can tell you that the novel features shape-shifting bears, foundlings and ghosts, acts of anger and revenge, and songs of creation and healing.

This is not a plot-driven novel. Bell's pacing is slow and meandering, and certain passages seem overly drawn out, which almost led me to give this book a three-star rating. However, his approach adds to the feeling of mystery and old magic in a book that is not at all a conventional work of fantasy or magical realism, but instead echoes the cadences of old tales from a long-lost oral tradition. My sense is that the novel could have benefited from some tighter editing. However, for readers who are willing to take their time with the novel and read it slowly, there's a wealth of themes to explore, and eerily-effective passages to read and savor. Much of the novel focuses on tensions surrounding fatherhood: Oedipal relationships, pain over losing closeness with a spouse, fear of death and loss of power to one's children. These themes are especially pronounced because much of the novel is told from the point of view of the husband. However, as we get deeper into the story, his wife's perspective also emerges. leading to depth in Bell's exploration of the complexity of marriage, and some sense of hope for generations to come. ...more

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Mar 12, 2014 Scott Southard rated it it was ok

I recently reviewed this book for WKAR's Current State.You can listen to my review here:

http://wkar.org/post/book-review-matt...

You can also read my book review below.

-

Sometimes the literary world can suffer from a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

We all know this story made famous by Hans Christian Andersen, of the ridiculous Emperor tricked into wearing nothing and the underlings around him too afraid to point out that he is only in his underwear. In the mind of the Emperor he is adorned in ...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Tim rated it did not like it · review of another edition

While I can tell the writer is a tolerably good stylist, and I can even tell he has a vivid imagination for fiction, this book is really quite terrible. It's much too ambitious, pretentiously so, all too aware of its aspirations towards the creation of a myth and caught up in a kind of fantastical world, not of this time (or any time) or of this place (or any place). I think it's about the erosion of meaning of fatherhood, or possibly about how we are continually destroying our planet, but by ab ...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Zoeytron rated it liked it

Shelves: public-library, new-fangled-e-reader

The reviews are all over the place on this one, not surprising for such an irregular weave. I loved the darkness of it, the weirdness of it, but the writing style wore on me, the repetitiveness irritating. But then I would come across a passage like this - '. . . around it her silence continued speaking for years and years, the sound of her saying nothing.' Or a mention of a bowl made of mirrors - as you drink from it, it drinks of you.

It is a tale of yearning, loss and regret. And blood, lots ...more

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Apr 27, 2020 Renee Godding rated it did not like it

Shelves: magical-realism

"And even if she could not remember his face, she could remember his voice. How tonedeaf he was. How he spoke ceaselessly, because like most men he could not sing. And because he could not say anything without too many words"
- A rather ironic quote from the book...

Magical Realism tends to be a polarizing genre in itself, but when reviews are this divided, it’s bound to catch my attention. As an overall fan of this genre and all its metaphorical strangeness, I had fairly high hopes. Unfortuna "And even if she could not remember his face, she could remember his voice. How tonedeaf he was. How he spoke ceaselessly, because like most men he could not sing. And because he could not say anything without too many words"
- A rather ironic quote from the book...

Magical Realism tends to be a polarizing genre in itself, but when reviews are this divided, it’s bound to catch my attention. As an overall fan of this genre and all its metaphorical strangeness, I had fairly high hopes. Unfortunately, the higher those hopes, the deeper the disappointment.

The House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is almost impossible to accurately summarize, as it ultimately is more fairytale than traditional novel, and as such comes with quite some bizarre and gruesome imagery, as well as a great number of layers. On the surface, it’s a story about an unnamed newly-wed couple who leave their homeland behind to move to the uninhabited opposite shore of the lake. There they live off the land and build their new home from only the elements surrounding them. After a series of miscarriages the wife despair manifests in the ability to “sing” objects into existence; a second moon in the sky that signals the end of the world, a labyrinth of memorychambers underneath the house, and eventually… a foundling.
Beneath these mental visuals lies a tale of grief, despair, marriage, and the subconscious fears and desires that come with parenthood, that honestly has a lot of great things to say.
From this description alone, it isn’t hard to see that Matt Bell has an incredible talent for evocative imagery and metaphorical storytelling. There are some fantastic (if deeply twisted) ideas in here, and if you allow yourself to be carried away by these mental pictures, this reads like a surrealist piece of art that is equally mesmerizing as terrifying. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible for me to do so, due to one large thorn in the paw of this bear: the writing style.

I consider myself to have quite a high tolerance and even appreciation for highly lyrical writing. This however, was at the best of times pretentious and at the worst unreadable for me. Some passages seemed to be written with the sole intend of showcasing literary prowess, to the point where the sentences seemed to be created by replacing every word with their longest and/or most obscure synonym the thesaurus has to offer.
Other sections of the book use a lot of repetition as a stylistic choice. There’s a section where the protagonist explores the aforementioned labyrinth of memory chambers under the house. Throughout this entire track, every sentence starts with “And in this room”, followed by a description of what he finds, before continuing. And when I say “every sentence”, I mean every sentence… for dozens of pages on end… All I can tell you is: after one page it became annoying, after tree it became unbearable and after what seemed like forever I actually skipped the entire section.
There’s such a thing as stylistic choices, and then there is taking wordiness so far that those words themselves lose all their meaning and your message gets lost along the way. I can’t help but mark this as a novel that fell prey to this in many regards.

I reserve my one-star reviews for books that are unredeemably bad or harmful, or that I actively hated whilst reading them. I’m sorry to say that this book fell firmly in that second category.
If you’re still interested in giving this novel a try, I recommend you set your expectations properly, and approach it more like a piece of poetry than a novel. Take in the imagery, more than the literal words, and most importantly: read it in little chunks at a time. there’s undoubtably an audience of magical realism veterans for this novel, but I unfortunately wasn’t among them. ...more

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Jun 18, 2013 Richard Thomas rated it it was amazing

THIS REVIEW ORIGINALLY RAN AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

In Matt Bell’s debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (Soho Press), we are lured into familiar territory—the world of fables and tall tales, where our expectations of the surreal, the grotesque, and the magical are fulfilled in ever-expanding layers. But beyond the illusions, beyond the world building, darkness, and the unknown is an allegory—a harsh yet beautiful lesson on what it means to be a man, a father, an ...more

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May 10, 2013 Robert rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

This novel reminded me of rowing a boat out to the middle of the lake, the water calm and clear and devoid of people and engines, the only sounds heard are the gentle rocking of the boat, the casting of the line as it whistles through the air, and the reel being unwound and wound. Instead of beer, there’s wine in the cooler, a sombrero on my head to block out the sun’s harsh rays, and a woman in a pantsuit to my left with her head back and sunglasses plastered on her face that make her look like ...more

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Apr 13, 2013 Chihoe Ho rated it did not like it

Like it's title, this novel ran on and on and on and on and on... It started with so much promise, full of intrigue and despair, but the style in which it was written in got the better of it. This mythical story would probably have worked better as a novella.

Matt Bell is a talented writer, however, his words become very indulgent and tedious to read after the initial discovery. It felt like the same idea repeated, just churned out in various embellished ways - almost as though Bell wrote a coupl ...more

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Oct 07, 2013 Blue Cypress Books rated it liked it

Enjoyed the ride but have no idea what I just read. The novel is all about relationships, I think. There is the squid and the whale and the bear and the man and the wife and the child but it's all just so heavy with symbolic meaning that I need a therapist to explain it all to me. ...more

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Aug 30, 2013 Watchingthewords rated it it was ok

Shelves: signed, own, indiespensable, fiction, 2013, fantasy

The latest installment from my Indiespensable subscription and I couldn’t wait to start!

A husband and wife move to the land between the lake and the woods to start their own life, across the lake from the city where they were raised. There they build their home and wish to build a family, but multiple failed pregnancies chips away at their hope, their marriage, and their sanity. That alone makes for an interesting concept for a book, but this one is wrapped in fable, a fairy tale, a fantasy worl ...more

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Jul 21, 2013 Cynthia rated it it was ok

Shelves: books-read-in-2013

Daddy Issues

“The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods” is a lovely extended poem about marriage and its vicissitudes especially after children come along. It’s told in a mythical fashion from the husband’s point of view. A young couple is living in isolation very close to the land, hunting and fishing for their own food, living in a cave while they make their own house. The husband ardently wants children and the wife is having trouble carrying pregnancies to full term. They both b ...more

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Oct 05, 2012 Michael Seidlinger rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Matt Bell's debut novel builds up layer after surreal layer, creating a narrative that functions like one hell of a literary cake. Make sure to go in hungry because, by the time you've finished, you will have taken in enough ghost-like imagery to stretch your imagination to full-capacity.

And yet... that isn't enough.
You'll hunger for more, a second and third reread of the novel.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is, quite simply, beautiful.

...more

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Jan 02, 2014 Amber Sparks rated it it was amazing

Beautiful, dark, violent, heart-rending, and real. Fable and fairy tale, yes, and after the authentic traditions of the best of these - full of transfiguration, suffering, and deep and troubled love. One of the best books from last year, or any year.

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Jun 21, 2013 Margaret rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-summer-2013, american, 21st-century-literature, indiespensable

Back when watching a monster movie on a Sunday afternoon after the homework was done was an achievable luxury (so YEARS ago), I came across Prophecy, a gem from 1979. Here is some classy monster movie poster art:

A movie poster

So a scientist hired by the EPA goes out to the Androscoggin River in Maine to figure out if a paper mill or something is going to poison everyone with mercury. An astute viewer might be able to conclude, why yes. Instead of the usual, mutant bears attack!

ew, mutant bear

To top it off, the EPA scient ...more

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Jul 19, 2013 Ron Charles rated it liked it

Praise from writers you’ve enjoyed might lure you into Matt Bell’s strange first novel, “In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods.” Lauren Groff, who wrote “Arcadia,” one of The Washington Post’s top five novels for 2012, calls it “glorious.” Jess Walter, whose “Beautiful Ruins” is still on our bestseller list, suggests that Bell has “invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas.” And here’s Karen Russell, fresh from “Swamplandia!,” comparing him to Italo Calvino.

Beware. A novel l Praise from writers you’ve enjoyed might lure you into Matt Bell’s strange first novel, “In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods.” Lauren Groff, who wrote “Arcadia,” one of The Washington Post’s top five novels for 2012, calls it “glorious.” Jess Walter, whose “Beautiful Ruins” is still on our bestseller list, suggests that Bell has “invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas.” And here’s Karen Russell, fresh from “Swamplandia!,” comparing him to Italo Calvino.

Beware. A novel like this — not that there are many like it — presents a peculiar challenge. I don’t necessarily want to scare you away, but I’d hate to see you stumble into “The Lake and the Woods” expecting anything like Russell’s witty alligator farm. Think instead of the magical realism of her most bizarre story in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” Then imagine that story chanted by a druid on mushrooms.

Bell’s opening line gives little indication that we’ve entered a very different kind of novel: “Before our first encounter with the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.” So far, so Hemingway. But almost immediately, you can hear Bell’s prose shift into the fabulist register as this unnamed narrator describes his wife’s contribution to their home: “Beneath the unscrolling story of new sun and stars and then-lonely moon, she began to sing some new possessions into the interior of our house, and between the lake and the woods I heard her songs become something stronger than ever before.”

It’s an intoxicating opening, dreamy but intensely, sometimes grotesquely, physical and rendered in syntax that’s just twisted enough to push us off balance. Bell is working in a tradition that stretches from Aimee Bender to Richard Brautigan to Walt Whitman and much, much further back into the mists of myth. For readers weary of literary fiction that dutifully obeys the laws of nature, here’s a story that stirs the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali with its claws.

The edenic young couple at the center of “The Lake and the Woods” have moved away from civilization to “this far lonelier shore” where they can live off the land and raise a large family. But those plans are thwarted: “The dirt’s wettest season swelled, and then its hottest burst the world to bloom, and through those tumid months my wife swelled too, expanded in both belly and breast until the leaves fell — and afterward came no more growth, only some stalling of the flesh gathering within her. Even before it was obvious that there would be no baby, even then my wife began to cry, to sing sadder songs that dimmed our already-fuel-poor gas-lamps, or cracked cups and bowls behind cupboard doors.”

The rough poetry of those sentences is just as gorgeous as it is devastating, cream spiked with grief. Anyone — and we are far more numerous than we let on — who’s experienced the shock and grinding horror of miscarriage or birth defects will be especially hit by these early pages. “I began to take more of my hours outside the house I had built,” the narrator says, “inhabiting instead the lake and the woods, whose strange failings could not be laid so squarely upon my deeds, nor the body of my wife.” In wholly unpredictable language, Bell captures the way sorrow wedges itself between a hopeful father and mother, triggering recessive genes of blame and suspicion that successful pregnancies would have left dormant in their minds. The wife calls down the stars and knits mismatched booties for babies that will never be born; the narrator keeps his distance until, soon, they’re not speaking to each other at all — “our lives a stasis of secrets.”

Despite the poignancy of these passages with their startling mixture of pedestrian and magical details, the story’s dominant tone is more grotesque: At the scene of the first miscarriage, the narrator tells us that he is so overcome by sadness and desire that “into my body I partook what my wife’s had rejected, and while she buried her face in the red ruin of our blankets I swallowed it whole — its ghost and its flesh. . . . I imagined that perhaps I would succeed where she had failed, that my want for family could again give our child some home, some better body within which to grow.”

You can’t break away from these first few pages, swept by storms of celebration and misery, false hope and surging resentment. As husband and wife try and fail again and again to bring a baby to term, that first miscarried fetus, which the narrator calls “the fingerling,” becomes conscious in his father’s body. This toddler incubus then turns his father against his mother and drives him on a surreal and bloody ordeal that lasts for the rest of the novel.

The narrator’s dark night of the soul takes him searching through ever-expanding subterranean structures that would give Steven Millhauser nightmares. Images of fire and ash and a world laid waste recur throughout like a version of “The Road” retold by St. John of Patmos. That bear from the opening line comes roaring back — a mangy, furious creature desperate to reclaim its own lost offspring. And several chapters dive into the saltwater lake where a squid lurks, spawning a vast collection of children.

Bell is doing fascinating, unnerving things here in his exploration of the most painful aspects of family life. This is the Oedipal complex flipped on its head — the father’s shameful dread of the son taking his wife. As a vision of parenting — particularly, the bitterness of failed fatherhood and the latent fear of women’s creative power — it’s a provocative piece of work.

But like its title, “In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods” runs on longer than it should. (In an interview with Ploughshares, Bell confessed that there was a “version of the novel that was at least 200 pages longer than the final book and much less reader-friendly,” which is, frankly, terrifying.) One confrontation with a rotting, angry bear is enough. All these descents through burned-out rooms begin to blur together. That endless bickering with the ingested fetus — “the fingerling” — sags from disturbing to merely annoying. And despite the story’s dalliance with mythical and biblical archetypes, it passeth all understanding. I thought I had a pretty firm grasp on the meaning of “the other moon” and “the squid” and “the bear,” but when “the man” became “the squid,” I began to feel like a Bear of Very Little Brain. Bell has claimed these elements are not allegorical. “The bear is just a bear,” he says, but that’s either disingenuous or he’s hiking in very different woods from the ones I’ve been in.

His publisher, Soho Press, is very high on this book — it sent at least seven copies to my office. For more than 25 years, Soho has been publishing sophisticated work that other New York houses wouldn’t touch. In 2011, for instance, it released a fantastic novel by Alex Shakar called “Luminarium” that included passages that were sometimes just as demanding and surreal as those found in Bell’s novel, and I’m delighted that such books can find a publisher and readers who will appreciate them. But I worry that “The Lake and the Woods” is not just difficult; it’s overwritten. The author has substituted a series of symbolic poses for effective articulation, assuming that repetition will generate emotional power. The justly celebrated poetry of his prose uses such a small palette that we learn his brush strokes fairly early. Eventually, his ideas are buried in the house upon the dirt between the lake and the woods by the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the moon and the cave and the stars and . . .

Well, you get the idea. ...more

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Apr 20, 2015 Krista rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015

That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is a strange and twisted narrative; a lost Brothers Grimm from the pre-sanitised days of a medieval Black Forest; a time when it was perfectly reasonable to tell tucked-in children
That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is a strange and twisted narrative; a lost Brothers Grimm from the pre-sanitised days of a medieval Black Forest; a time when it was perfectly reasonable to tell tucked-in children about a huntsman chopping open the conscious wolf's belly to free Little Red. This is not a fable – with some aphoristic kernel at its center – but a fairy tale; red in tooth and claw and bursting through the limits of the plausible.

It begins with a young married couple, unnamed, who have left their families and travelled to an unreal and virgin hinterland in which to begin their lives together. While the husband fells trees to build their house, the wife has a violent encounter with a cave bear that leaves them without material possessions, but grants the wife the ability to sing anything into being. When she suffers a series of miscarriages, the wife sings down the destruction of their world, and as the husband continues to pressure her to try and try again for a baby, the wife turns to subterfuge to grant his wish. As a meditation on grief and loss, gender roles and marital expectations, In the House has much to say.

What if I could become deep father and she deep mother and the foundling or the fingerling our deep child, and what if the whole world I had known – all that lake and dirt and house and woods and bear and what was not a bear, all that father and mother and child and ghost-child and moon and moons – what if all that was failed forever, doomed by our years of childlessness, our despair over those long years?

Yet In the House doesn't present a straightforward allegory, but rather, is relentless in its offering of outlandish ideas; each sentence wondrous strange, but the paragraphs somehow not adding up to something more. Perhaps it should be approached like a book of poetry: consumed in smallish chunks and only expecting the whole to be vaguely cohesive. I cannot deny that I was swept along by paragraphs like this one:

At the sound of my voice, the bear slipped, staggered, the front of her body lower than the back and now sliding sideways, and as I tightened my grip on the pommel of a protruding shoulder blade, the bone shattered, became a handful of dust. The bear cried out, bent the wide wedge of her head back upon me, and she was near blind then too, one eye clouded, the long-drooping other caked with layered rheum and salt, grinding as it turned in its orbit. She opened her mouth to make some warning, but there was so little growl left in her, too little to waste. Snot dripped from her caved nostrils, and the remains of her lips drooled white clumps of thirsty spit, and the cords in her neck jumped between her bones, so that I could see her stretched muscles working her toothless face, that countenance no less fearsome for its lack of skin, of underlying blood with which to make its hate known, and to that face I said, I'm sorry.

Yes, this is a lot of quoting, but for a work like this, it seems only fair to let author Matt Bell speak for himself. In the end, I can only say that I was enjoying In the House while I was reading it, but struggled to get through it, and upon reflection, didn't get much out of it but an admiration for its language.

And yet! And always, and no matter. All that was ended, and this too.
...more

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Jul 02, 2013 Ruby Tombstone Lives! rated it it was amazing

Shelves: youre-living-in-a-fantasy-man, magical-realism, littry-fikshun, favorites, creepy-kooky-and-or-spooky

In the house upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, a young wife, (who incidentally has the power to sing objects into existence), miscarries her first child. Her husband ingests the foetus, which is hell-bent on securing for itself both a body and a mother. Thus begins an all-out war between the elements of the couple's tiny private world: dirt, house, lake, woods, father, mother, ghost, moon(s), darkness. You can throw in fingerling (foetus), foundling (human/bar hybrid), rampaging-deca ...more

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Mar 21, 2013 Kathy Cowie rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, kindle-book, netgalley, own-it

I am torn about this book. In the beginning, I didn’t think I was going to get through it. The language seemed too calculated; trying so hard for greatness when interesting would have been enough. Once I got into it, I found much of it beautifully written, even lyrical. But there were inconsistencies that I hope, given it was a proof, will be corrected. Sometimes, though I did think it was beautifully written, it went dangerously close to being pretentious. I became engrossed in this mythical wo ...more

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Sep 16, 2014 Dottie B rated it did not like it

Is this a Keanu Reeves movie? Lol! You know he played Johnny Utah in a little movie called Point Break. And graduated from a little university in that movie called... wait for it... THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY! (Go Buckeyes!) This book reminds me of how our Glorious Buckeyes lost to those cheating Hokies two weeks ago at VA Tech. You know Michael Vick went to VA Tech. And he fights dogs. Shame!

The guy who wrote this book should have been a lawyer or a doctor, or somebody successful. Something that ...more

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Jun 12, 2013 Mary Harju rated it really liked it

One of the best books of the summer--maybe even the year! It is truly epic, blending archetypes, mythology, and a dreamlike confrontation of excruciatingly personal dilemmas. A husband and wife come together and apart, making children, fighting against nature, and finally fighting with nature against each other. The theme of memory is continually present, being shaped and honed continually by the action taking place. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship will come across painful flashes ...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Molly rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Loved this. At first I was worried I wouldn't be able to get into it—Bell strips everything of proper name, all features of detail. We know little except that there are woods, and dirt, and lake, and house. The only granular information readers get is bodily: Bell does not skimp on anatomical information. Anyway, though it is fable-like in its very conscious simplicity, it is enough. A beautiful, terrible, sad, and gut-curdling book. ...more

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Jun 30, 2013 Clark Knowles rated it it was amazing

you can read a better formatted version of this at www.clarkknowles.com

I'm not a reviewer of books, merely a reader. I read carefully, of course, as someone who writes must read. But I've never been much of a reviewer. For the most part, I don't really read a lot of reviews either. I tend to find new books through recommendations and quite often, through acquaintances. That's how I found Matt Bell's new book In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. I know Matt through Facebook you can read a better formatted version of this at www.clarkknowles.com

I'm not a reviewer of books, merely a reader. I read carefully, of course, as someone who writes must read. But I've never been much of a reviewer. For the most part, I don't really read a lot of reviews either. I tend to find new books through recommendations and quite often, through acquaintances. That's how I found Matt Bell's new book In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. I know Matt through Facebook and Twitter. I've met him once for a few moments at the Dzanc table at the AWP conference. I heard about his new book through social media. And then my friend Michele Filgate--a writer's champion like no other--tweeted one day that Matt's new book, his first novel, was stunning. Since then, I've seen easily a dozen reviews about the work. Nearly all of them are deserved raves. When I finished reading the novel myself, I wanted to write something, but what can a non-reviewing reader write about a book that hasn't already been said in a dozen or more reviews by qualified reviewers? Here's what I stumbled onto:

When I pick up a book, I want to have my socks not off. When I finished ITHUTDBTLATW, my socks had been obliterated.
Here is a sentence from early in the book: By the time the foundling began to sing my wife's simplest songs I had learned to restrain the fingerling, but always he watched for his chances, and soon all my angers were ulcered inside me, and one by one the fingerling sought their increased company, in whatever pits they burned their slow language. Read that aloud. Read it slowly. You MUST read it slowly.
Speaking of reading slowly. Is anyone reading slowly any more? Stop speed reading, people. I keep entering that Goodreads contest where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books each year. I can never keep up with my own expectations. It's too much pressure. I read slow. Get over it. How can you not want to read a book like Matt's Bell's ITHUTDBTLATW slowly? If you read this book and you read it quickly, you didn't read it.
I've never read anything quite like this book. Each review I've seen of Matt's book tries to reference a few other books like it. There are no books like it. I tried to think of a book like it. I failed. There is a fantastic book by Stanley Crawford titled The Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine born from the same unreachable cosmos, but it is nothing like Matt's book.
With apologies to Faulkner, this may be the best piece of American fiction ever written about a bear. But the book isn't really about a bear. Nor is the bear always a...oh, just go read it. Trying to explain it takes the magic away.
Many people use the word mythic or myth when writing about this book. I think that is the wrong word to use.
Many people have called the prose lyric, too. Lyric seems to small a word. I was trying to find a word that was closer to "music" but failed. Music might be the right word. Certainly, the language concerns songs and singing. Certainly, the prose has it's own lyricism. But none of those words really fit.
I'm by no means a Carl Jung scholar, but I've read his book Man and His Symbols. In that book, written for the lay-person, he says that there are certain symbols that bubble up from man's unconscious. Not his subconscious. Deeper than that. Further away than any piddly ol' subconscious. Way down deep in the ooze. The primordial soup. Jung says those images appear to us in our dreams. That idea fits Matt Bell's novel better than myth. Myths are only as old as man. ITHUTDBTLATW, while about the realities of the flesh, comes from a place before man. Before our stories.
There is no way a review or a blog post can adequately summarize this book for you. If you see someone try, run the other direction. I went into this book with only the barest hint of an idea about the path the story would take. And that hint was shattered in the first ten pages. After that, I was just along for the ride.
Primal. That' the right word. Not mythic or lyric or post-post or meta or absurdist or magically realistic. None of those lit-class words fit. It's primal, before the dawn stuff.
It's haunting, too. And beautiful. As violent and fierce as some of the sections are, there is also just a lot of beauty. The whole book is beautiful. The last fifty pages are so beautiful it will hurt your feelings.
I talk to my writing students all the time about taking risks and following their creative paths wherever they lead. I can think of no better example of such a thing happening as Matt Bell's novel. He followed his imagination and recorded this primal music. That makes it sound like it poured out of him in one sitting. I know that's not the case. I know he worked his ass off getting this book right, getting the words and sentences right. He worked so hard on this book that it looks like he never had to work on it.
I closed the book and the first thought that ran through my head: I want to write better stories. I don't want to do what Matt's done, but his book made me want to make strong art.
I don't know if this book is for every reader, but it's for me. I like that it's difficult and rewarding and that I can't stop thinking about the final moments. I'm going to tell everyone about it. Matt's an incredibly nice person and a pretty tireless citizen in the writing community. He deserves all the good things being said about him. This work deserves all the good things people are saying about it. Go read it. But read it slowly. Who cares if it takes you, like it did me, three weeks. Sometimes I read the same page two or three times. It's that damn good.
Thank you, Matt Bell, for this book.
And yes, I know this was only supposed to be a top ten list. Sue me. ...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Jaime Boler rated it it was amazing

Shelves: june-2013

Reading Matt Bell’s first novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, I often looked up from the book and blinked furiously in confusion. I expected to see a house with myriad rooms, a strange sky above me, a lake in the distance, and a wooded green. Instead, my own familiar environs surrounded me. That is just how powerful the setting is in Bell’s dreamlike, fabled, and beautiful debut. The story of a marriage and its collapse become much more as Bell infuses myth, allegor
Reading Matt Bell’s first novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, I often looked up from the book and blinked furiously in confusion. I expected to see a house with myriad rooms, a strange sky above me, a lake in the distance, and a wooded green. Instead, my own familiar environs surrounded me. That is just how powerful the setting is in Bell’s dreamlike, fabled, and beautiful debut. The story of a marriage and its collapse become much more as Bell infuses myth, allegory, and symbolism into his story, transforming the work into something else entirely.

A couple marries and, longing to get away from the rest of the world, moves to a bizarre land. The husband builds them a house, which the wife improves upon not by her hands but with her voice. If the husband starts building a room, for example, the wife can simply sing the rest of the space into being. For a time, despite the presence of a bear, a presence that looms over the entire novel, they are harmonious. Yet, their family is incomplete.

He longs for a child; she tries to give him one, but fulfilling that longing is not easy as her every pregnancy fails. The wife senses that she and her husband are slowly drifting further and further away from one another. Determined to save her marriage, the wife sings a son into existence. When the husband discovers the horrible truth of the child’s origins, he goes in search of his wife and their “foundling.”

As the husband walks through the house his wife built, now abandoned by them, Bell shows us the remnants of a failed marriage. “And in this room,” Bell writes, “The sound of my wife’s knuckle first sliding beneath the beaten silver of that ring, a sound never before heard, or else forgotten amidst all the other business of our wedding day.” Behind each door the husband opens is a different and striking scene. Each room holds a memory, a recollection the husband has long forgotten, but which the wife tucks away.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods may seem otherworldly, but the story is actually very familiar and recognizable. “As her side of our bedchamber grew some few inches, I did what little I could to right our arrangement, tugged hard at the blankets that barely covered the widened bed—until once again all things were distributed evenly, even as they were somehow also further apart.”

The debut is a simple story of love, marriage, parenthood, and aging amplified by mystery, lore, and imagery. A fabulous and fantastical journey into the heart of a husband and wife and into the unknown, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is by turns dark, mysterious, and foreboding. Bell imbues such imagination and brilliance into this tale. Bell provides a real insight into ourselves, and therein lies the real beauty of the story.

As the years pass and the couple gets older, the wife can no longer remember her husband or the foundling. Sadly, she cannot even remember the songs she once sang. Most arresting to me was the squid the husband turned into as he swam into the depths of the murky lake, his aches and pains and age dissolving away. Muted passages like these spoke volumes to me and lend the narrative richness and power.

Reminiscent of the work of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods has already garnered attention from the Indie Next list, choosing it as one of its selections for July. Bell’s lyrical language, his crystal clarity, and his sharp and colorful setting explain what all the fuss is about and herald the arrival of a major new literary talent.

When you open In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, you leave your world behind and enter a shadowy and forbidding landscape. And you will be so glad you did.
...more

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Jun 21, 2013 Chaitra rated it liked it

Shelves: literary-fiction, netgalley, fantasy, arc-reviews, lyrical-fiction

I came across this book on The Book Page, and since they called it mesmerizing, I had to request for a copy from NetGalley. I found I liked the title too, to the point. There's a lake and there are woods, and upon the dirt there's a house. A labyrinthine house full of memories, mostly sad - because the couple inhabiting them have not had a great marriage. They've struggled for a baby, and they have had several miscarriages. They grow incrementally disillusioned and cruel with each other until on I came across this book on The Book Page, and since they called it mesmerizing, I had to request for a copy from NetGalley. I found I liked the title too, to the point. There's a lake and there are woods, and upon the dirt there's a house. A labyrinthine house full of memories, mostly sad - because the couple inhabiting them have not had a great marriage. They've struggled for a baby, and they have had several miscarriages. They grow incrementally disillusioned and cruel with each other until one day the wife produces a baby, a foundling. The husband doesn't believe it's his, and he has his own reasons for being bitter. He has swallowed his first little baby-to-be in a moment of desperation, and it's now lodged in him lending its own bitterness to him. Oh, and the woods has a bear and the lake a squid, who are both not what they appear to be. And the wife's song brings their universe to life.

Weird? Very. It's epic, after a fashion. It's a frustrating read as we follow the husband making one bad choice after another, no pure driven snow him. But there's more to it than that and had I been paying the strictest attention I would probably have rated it more extremely. Reviews have described this book as mesmerizing and hypnotic. What it was for me was lulling and soporific. I made myself read 20-30 pages at a time, and I still fell fast asleep somewhere in the middle. After waking up from my short impromptu nap, I would switch to another book and I'd be wide awake. I don't mean this in a bad way, not strictly at least. There was something to the way the book is composed that was calm and comforting, which probably made it easier for me to read it. It's not a book for a woman pregnant otherwise, there's violent imagery aplenty, and most of it directed towards children (born and unborn). The parents do the most desperate things, and when they do have a baby in front of them, they're still mean and nasty. And all those miscarriages. It should have been nightmare inducing. It wasn't. I was anesthetized by the cadence of the book's prose.

So all in all, even though it was a bit of a struggle to get through, I still ended up liking it. I'm probably not making the best of cases in support of the book, but it's something I'm really glad I read. I will get around to reading it again as it should be read (wide awake and as much as possible, in one sitting) once my baby is born. Three stars.

I received a copy of this book for review via NetGalley. ...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Christy rated it really liked it

Shelves: 21st-century-american-lit, arc-netgalley

Matt Bell's In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is a dreamy and poetic story. The novel is not a quick read and I'm not entirely sure yet what I think of it, but it is frequently rewarding. It tells of the costs of marriage, of the ways relationships stunt and twist us, the ways our expectations of each other warp us. It tells of the desire for family and the pains this desire brings when thwarted and when fulfilled. It tells of the ways that our bodies betray us and the wa ...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Valentina rated it it was amazing

It’s hard to write a review for this kind of genre-bending book. It is such a detailed, nuanced novel, so wholly original, that it is tough to put into words what exactly makes it work. Because it does work.
I suppose it’s the writing. The lush, wandering narrative takes the reader on almost an underwater journey. Our senses are diffused by the fable-like story until we are just a little intoxicated by the descriptions. We never find out where it takes place, we don’t know the protagonists names, ...more

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Mar 17, 2013 Megan added it

i really love Matt's short fiction, have taught WOLF PARTS a few times now, and had been looking forward to reading his first novel all summer -- even saved it as a reward for finishing up a bunch of other stuff. i'm disappointed.

the epic mythicality of the narrative is at times quite awesome (i particularly enjoyed the squid-whale) and there is a lot to love in its fearless gruesomeness. but ultimately i couldn't get past the narrative's reification of masculine/feminine principles, its obsess ...more

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Jul 01, 2013 Cat rated it really liked it

Upon reading the first few pages it was immediately clear that this book was somewhat out of my comfort zone. I don't know how to explain it other than it wasn't a book I would normally choose. And yet, The writing is hauntingly beautiful and compelling.

I started with the sample and couldn't help but think that it read like a short story - how was this going to carry through for an entire novel? Yet it did. The story keeps spinning and spinning around and each time I think there can't be more, ...more

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Dec 23, 2015 Dana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites

As I was reading this I felt profound jealousy at Bell's ability to write an entire novel woven, sentence by sentence, of pure poetry. This book has elevated the standard of what I previously perceived as "beautifully written".
The story itself could easily be a poem, it's figurative yet literal and visceral and bloody and undoubtedly haunting. It doesn't shy away from its gore. It doesn't attempt to mask the undertones of nausea running through it. It gives you a family in its rawest state, dis ...more

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About Matt Bell

Matt Bell

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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction bo ...more