House on Fire utterly gutted me; I very nearly cried — and I am not easily moved. As a historian I am immersed in our collective debris, the ugliness of humanity constantly. But this novel’s humanity, the harsh, honest, and all too familiar trauma of the human experience it brings to the fore struck me hard, so much so the reader in me dreaded and welcomed its final pages. Several times I had to set down this novel, take in a breath, take a break.
House on Fire belongs to that category of novel which epitomizes literature’s ideal. Like Ian McEwan’s moral-bending work or Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, House on Fire forces the reader to reflect deeply, demands the reader challenge their own existence, choices, life. Its tagline is apt: How far would you go to keep a promise? This novel forced me to consider my own ethics, my own values, the relationships of my own life.
I will not forget this book.
The opening line alone will arrest you. It delivers the novel’s premise, one which confronts the reader and its protagonist immediately: Bernadette, an ICU nurse is asked to euthanize a man by his wife, but this is beyond a professional request: the man is her father, the wife her mother. The reader becomes witness to a far more complicated situation that one of abstract ethics, should she or shouldn’t she? It becomes personal in much deeper ways. The reader is immersed in the life of a family, chapters retreating back in time provide a full view of Bernadette; her sister Colleen and brother Adam; her mother and father. Bernadette’s life is, like our own, far more entangled than it would seem; there is also her “ex”, Shayne and her son, Jax, her best friend and colleague, Kara, Kara’s husband, Eliot, Colleen’s husband, Liam and their nine children. Their relationships and struggles, as portrayed in House on Fire identify and challenge the obligations and bonds between parents and children, children to their parents, between siblings, between spouses. What do we owe? What are we owed in return? Is “owe” even the right word here? Maybe, maybe not.
The novel unfolds over the course of a few weeks, but transports us to other times and places as well; in that short and interminable length of the time, a number of events occur, both traumatic and mundane, devastating and reconciliatory. A House on Fire is a portrait of real life.
The beginning conundrum is one which threads through the entire book: Will Bernadette help euthanize her father? Will fate force her decision? Is her decision even hers to make? The ending will leave the reader — as it did this one — in tears or close to it. This reader found these to be tears of relief and sadness, tears of grief for the loss of the past and tears of gratitude for what has been gained in return.
House of Fire was published March, 2023 and can be purchased from Amazon here for $12.99 for the paperback, $2.99 for the Kindle, or free with Kindle Unlimited. The novel is 274 pages.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 