The Dead of the House

IN THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE we are in the Ohio and Michigan of the thirties and forties, among people who have lived too long and too passively on the triumphs of their tough-skinned professional and businessman ancestors. Long sessions are spent at grandfather's knee talking about the past glories an humorous situations of the 200 year old Nyefamily while a girl grows from an awkward and blushing younger sister into a woman. Constantly in the background is the lingering odor of dusty flintlock pistols and buckskin boots, of roaring fires and dried leaves and venison stew, all reminders of a pioneer toughness which once guranteed the Nye family a solid place in this world. But the family's situation is a little different now and reading the book one smells the pine needles along a summer lake at dusk, tastes the first squirt of lemon juice out of a sugar lemonstick, and feels what it's like to stand out in the evening breeze in freshly cleaned clothes after a day's swimming. It is the story of a particular kind of middle class childhood, which smacks more of Mary McCarthy, the Bryn Mawr maypole, and F. Scott Fitzgerald than of such types as Holden Coulfield. It is middle class with the accent on class.

Vanessa Nye, the narrator, is introduced as a small girl sitting on her grandfather's lap listening to the story of how her ancestors came to America. ("In the year 1840 my great-grandfather, the Reverend Mr. Nathaniel Nye, who was then the minister of the Baptist Chapel at Barnoldswick in the West Riding of Yorkshire, received a call from God to go to the New world, and so he did.") She says the knew the story already but wanted to hear it again because "it was a good story and I wanted to hear him tell it." That happens again and again.

To a point the history and lore of the Nye family provides Vanessa with a sense of belonging, a feeling that she is the sum product of chance intersections of time, love and blood. But the point is reached rather quickly and then family can only be an oppressing force. When the insane Grandfather Nye dies, Vanessa's reaction is immediate:

I thought there were many dead people in the house and I could feel the musty coldness of everything, the dust in the unused corners the gray light in the thin back staircases, the closed off rooms, the great dark attic where Grandmother Nye used to sit over by the dormer window. Now. I thought, all the dead would come to life in their offices with flowers all around and I would have to bend close: I would have to feel their noses with my nose and kiss their mouths... In my mind only the memory of her dead body and my fear of inheriting her insanity grew.

AS HER FAMILY dies off, as such families seem to slowly and with a dash of insanity and accent, it is only her friends who provide her with an opportunity for exploration and growth. But these contacts are painfully few, and as she grows the importance of her establishing her own life becomes increasingly more urgent. Grandfather Nye will sit and talk about canoe trips in the North but not one of them is about to get up and take one. Over the years the family has become detached from the things that gave it strength the wilderness book writing philanthropy. what once was action stemming from raw curiosity has been watered down into a passive nostalgia affording little substance for young lives. The dead of the house provide identities but little else.

Certainly the best written and most memorable part of the book is the chapter "Summer Afternoon. Summer Afternoon, " which describes with intensity the lake summer of a girl growing up:

On hot afternoons Hay on my cot on the sleeping porch reading and I remembered in my body afternoons when we were little when we look our naps on our cots in the green afternoon heat that came through the beech leaves and knew without knowing that Mama and Daddy lay naked together in their sun-hot room with a silver fire blending their white bodies.... Later I went into the forest. I went to the place where the virgin maples were and got out my mirror and looked at myself in the green forest high. I saw the pale maple leaves high above and thought my skin was green the way Rima's in Green Mansions was.

The book is good, not because it manages to evoke in an incredibly precise and moving way the feeling and joy of youth, but because it knows at all times where it its going. The writing in many places verges on the florid, yet never crosses the line, being always in perfect control of itself, delicately honed to the task at hand. Childhood remembrances are a dime a dozen and subject now to the charge of irrelevance, but it is hard to understand how a book that feels and says as much as this one would ever succumb to that sort of criticism.