A review by booksaremysuperpower
The Red House by Mark Haddon
2.0
Le sigh. A Reader's Dilemma: can you still enjoy a book and call it not good at the same time?
I'll admit I was a bit hesitant to pick up this book because the Goodreads ratings were consistently on the negative side, but I do really enjoy Mark Haddon and so I felt it deserved a read . While this is by no means his best book, I can still say that I liked it. I was torn between giving it a two or three star review, and ultimately I left it at a two because even though the writing carries much of Haddon's humor and spark, the story itself is such a yawn.
From reading other reviews, most people took issue with the "Stream of Consciousness" writing style Haddon employed in this book. This didn't bother so much, per se, but after a while the paragraphs of text from books the characters were reading, snippets of song lyrics, or the general list of flora/fauna/things to do in town that Haddon inserts randomly into the novel got on my nerves. I didn't know what these bits of text were supposed to mean in relation to the overall story and quite honestly, I didn't want to work that hard trying to read this book and figure it all out. I get why the author used this style of writing, though. All of us who have had family issues and are in uncomfortable situations among uncomfortable people, tend to be there and NOT there at the same time. We are on alert for any offense the estranged family member may or may not say, and yet when you are around someone whom you just don't like, your mind tends to drift off into our your own world. In this respect, Haddon captures that dichotomy perfectly with each of the characters. But it gets carried too far and too often, in my opinion.
I would say my biggest gripe with the novel is that Haddon doesn't create anything new here. I felt like I've read about these characters before in a different novel by a different author with a similar story. And in fact, essences of these characters show up in Haddon's other novel "A Spot of Bother", too. The only character in "Red House" that felt fresh and interesting was Angela, the troubled mother who may have the onset of Alzheimer's and is struggling to come to terms with her grief over her still-born baby 17 years prior. This is a story line I haven't seen too often in novels: grief and mourning mixed in with potential mental illness and how others cope with it. I almost think that if Haddon focused solely on Angela as the main character, this book would have been drastically more intriguing.
Instead, we get a hodge podge and imbalanced mix of angst and anxieties from all the characters, some of whom do not relate well to the overall story. Alex, the oldest son of Angela, for example, is barely in the book during the first half and adds little to the overall story line in general. Daisy, younger sister, gets a lot of page time but her story reads like a Lifetime Movie of the week (and not a very good one): girl who is dying to be loved, joins a Church, everyone misunderstands her, she secretly thinks she might be a lesbian, gets rejected by the mean popular girl... I actually yawned. Hasn't this been done before?
Benjy, the youngest son, is second to Angela in terms of character development. The author has a delicate and unique touch to writing young children, and Benjy's character carries a whiff of the autistic son in 'The Curious incident of the dog at Midnight", which is a spectacular read. While the women in the novel are written with some element of depth, the men are surprisingly lacking any sort of refreshing complexity. Again, it comes to down to revisiting these archetypes in many different novels: the selfish and removed doctor who has trouble relating, the cheating and lying husband, the horny teenager. Nothing exceptionally groundbreaking.
Haddon's humor still exists in this book and that is really why I waffled between two and three stars. He's just so funny, and his observations about people and how we tick tend to be spot on. But his humor gets a little tricky and sticks out like a sore thumb when it really shouldn't. His descriptions of the pastoral landscape of Wales, for example, felt oddly out of place given the simple dialogue between the characters. His language runs the gambit between poetic, lyrical, and downright brash. Think of a Walden poem with "poo" and "arse" scattered here and there. It doesn't fit somehow, as though the novel started off as something else but ended up going a different direction and none of the necessary connections were made. The story just felt too underdeveloped for me to truly appreciate. If you are fans of Haddon I wouldn't steer you away, but he is ultimately a much better writer than this latest effort.
I'll admit I was a bit hesitant to pick up this book because the Goodreads ratings were consistently on the negative side, but I do really enjoy Mark Haddon and so I felt it deserved a read . While this is by no means his best book, I can still say that I liked it. I was torn between giving it a two or three star review, and ultimately I left it at a two because even though the writing carries much of Haddon's humor and spark, the story itself is such a yawn.
From reading other reviews, most people took issue with the "Stream of Consciousness" writing style Haddon employed in this book. This didn't bother so much, per se, but after a while the paragraphs of text from books the characters were reading, snippets of song lyrics, or the general list of flora/fauna/things to do in town that Haddon inserts randomly into the novel got on my nerves. I didn't know what these bits of text were supposed to mean in relation to the overall story and quite honestly, I didn't want to work that hard trying to read this book and figure it all out. I get why the author used this style of writing, though. All of us who have had family issues and are in uncomfortable situations among uncomfortable people, tend to be there and NOT there at the same time. We are on alert for any offense the estranged family member may or may not say, and yet when you are around someone whom you just don't like, your mind tends to drift off into our your own world. In this respect, Haddon captures that dichotomy perfectly with each of the characters. But it gets carried too far and too often, in my opinion.
I would say my biggest gripe with the novel is that Haddon doesn't create anything new here. I felt like I've read about these characters before in a different novel by a different author with a similar story. And in fact, essences of these characters show up in Haddon's other novel "A Spot of Bother", too. The only character in "Red House" that felt fresh and interesting was Angela, the troubled mother who may have the onset of Alzheimer's and is struggling to come to terms with her grief over her still-born baby 17 years prior. This is a story line I haven't seen too often in novels: grief and mourning mixed in with potential mental illness and how others cope with it. I almost think that if Haddon focused solely on Angela as the main character, this book would have been drastically more intriguing.
Instead, we get a hodge podge and imbalanced mix of angst and anxieties from all the characters, some of whom do not relate well to the overall story. Alex, the oldest son of Angela, for example, is barely in the book during the first half and adds little to the overall story line in general. Daisy, younger sister, gets a lot of page time but her story reads like a Lifetime Movie of the week (and not a very good one): girl who is dying to be loved, joins a Church, everyone misunderstands her, she secretly thinks she might be a lesbian, gets rejected by the mean popular girl... I actually yawned. Hasn't this been done before?
Benjy, the youngest son, is second to Angela in terms of character development. The author has a delicate and unique touch to writing young children, and Benjy's character carries a whiff of the autistic son in 'The Curious incident of the dog at Midnight", which is a spectacular read. While the women in the novel are written with some element of depth, the men are surprisingly lacking any sort of refreshing complexity. Again, it comes to down to revisiting these archetypes in many different novels: the selfish and removed doctor who has trouble relating, the cheating and lying husband, the horny teenager. Nothing exceptionally groundbreaking.
Haddon's humor still exists in this book and that is really why I waffled between two and three stars. He's just so funny, and his observations about people and how we tick tend to be spot on. But his humor gets a little tricky and sticks out like a sore thumb when it really shouldn't. His descriptions of the pastoral landscape of Wales, for example, felt oddly out of place given the simple dialogue between the characters. His language runs the gambit between poetic, lyrical, and downright brash. Think of a Walden poem with "poo" and "arse" scattered here and there. It doesn't fit somehow, as though the novel started off as something else but ended up going a different direction and none of the necessary connections were made. The story just felt too underdeveloped for me to truly appreciate. If you are fans of Haddon I wouldn't steer you away, but he is ultimately a much better writer than this latest effort.