The Red House
From Mark Haddon, the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, comes a dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family life.
Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister and her family to join his family for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Against the backdrop of a strange family gathering, Haddon skillfully weaves together the stories of eight very different people forced into close quarters. The Red House is a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly guarded secrets and illicit desires, painting a portrait of contemporary family life that is at once bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
I know that it's a perfectly valid literary technique to write in fragments rather than full sentences. I know that frequent jumps from one character's perspective to another is also quite acceptable. But I find books that do either too much, let alone both, very hard to read. And yes, Haddon employs both techniques throughout this book. So you may take my less-than-positive feelings about this book with a grain of salt, but there it is.
That being said, Haddon definitely made the right choice to write this book from the perspective of all the characters. If he had tried to write it from the perspective of a single character there would have been no there there. But the perspective changes so quickly (in some cases a character has only a single paragraph) and with only an extra line space between shifts that it can be kind of dizzying. Unfortunately, it was very hard for me to enjoy this jumpy narrative.
That being said, Haddon definitely made the right choice to write this book from the perspective of all the characters. If he had tried to write it from the perspective of a single character there would have been no there there. But the perspective changes so quickly (in some cases a character has only a single paragraph) and with only an extra line space between shifts that it can be kind of dizzying. Unfortunately, it was very hard for me to enjoy this jumpy narrative.
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