Housebreaking by Dan Pope

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 12, 2015

A troubled marriage, a rebellious child, extramarital sex, a workplace fling. All of those are ingredients of a standard domestic drama, but Housebreaking is more inventive than the norm. It spins off in directions I did not anticipate. The title has a couple of distinct meanings but the book is largely about a family that, while intact, is clearly broken.

The story introduces Andrew and Audrey Martin-Murray as they are house shopping in Wintonbury, a Hartford suburb. While Andrew can't understand how their family of three could possibly live in a 2,000 square foot home, Audrey is charmed by a dilapidated old house that has yet to be torn down in a neighborhood of McMansions. She is less charmed by a husband who is rarely home and with whom she has little in common. Her daughter Emily might be even harder to deal with than her husband. Their ways of coping with the loss of Emily's brother (a death that precedes the opening of the novel) are quite different.

Down the street, Benjamin Mandelbaum is, at the age of 44, back in the house where he grew up, having moved in with Leonard, his father, after separating from his wife in their 24th year of marriage. Benjamin, who spends most of his time trying to figure out what he wants, is linked to Audrey by the high school crush he once had on her.

The first section of the novel focuses on the Mandelbaums. The rest of the story provides an x-ray view of the interiors of Audrey, Andrew, and Emily. Each section of the novel reveals certain pivotal moments from the perspective of each family member. There is little overlap, however, since each character has his or her own story -- stories that are vastly different, reflecting lives lived apart from the family unit. Each family member has an ugly secret and each lives in fear that the other family members will discover that secret. They all have reason to feel guilty but they are all too self-absorbed to notice the guilty feelings that the other family members manifest. This is ultimately a story about family members who create tragedy by never being there for each other.

I love the life that Dan Pope breathes into his characters. The genius of this novel is its ability to create sympathy for badly behaving characters who aren't at all sympathetic. Small sections of the novel (primarily Emily's conversations with her dead brother) seem obvious and manipulative compared to the rest and I was disappointed that more was not made of Benjamin's father, given his early prominence. The story leaves much unresolved, but life is always unresolved until we die, so -- despite my curiosity about the outcome of Andrew's life -- the story's unfinished nature did not trouble me greatly.

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