When critics lavish praise on a new novel, I generally find that I don't like it myself. This is true with Rebecca Makkai's latest book, The Hundred-Year House (#413). I kept reading it because it was a Good Reads giveaway I won, and I kept hoping that as the story went back in time, all would be revealed. It wasn't.
It's ostensibly the story of an estate near Chicago which in its sordid past has served as a middling-rated artists' colony, a banishment for a daughter who has married unsuitably below her, the site of a mysterious suicide, and rent-free living with the parents for an academic daughter whose husband just can't manage to write the biography that will guarantee his employment at the local college. The story progresses backwards in increments from 1999 to 1900, but it may leave you more confused at the end than when you started it. The present haunts the past, the artist reveals more by what she omits, and all that.
Can't say I liked any of the characters or their plights. They seemed to me uniformly unpleasant, deceitful and, frankly, not worth caring about. There's remarkably little about the house which is the eponymous character, either. The biggest mystery as far as I was concerned was whether the estate was located in the United States or Canada, since the Devohrs, the wealthy family who built and maintained the house, were part of Toronto society. That is one of the facts that is actually revealed here more than halfway through.
By all means, read it if you think those in your circles will be discussing it over cocktails this season; otherwise, you might want to look elsewhere.
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