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Summary
Summary
The acclaimed author of The Borrower returns with a dazzlingly original, mordantly witty novel about the secrets of an old-money family and their turn-of-the-century estate, Laurelfield.
"Rebecca Makkai is a writer to watch, as sneakily ambitious as she is unpretentious."
-- Richard Russo
Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents' wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teÐ and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there's Violet Devohr, Zee's great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.
Violet's portrait was known to terrify the artists who resided at the house from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it served as the Laurelfield Arts Colony--and this is exactly the period Zee's husband, Doug, is interested in. An out-of-work academic whose only hope of a future position is securing a book deal, Doug is stalled on his biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, once in residence at the colony. All he needs to get the book back on track--besides some motivation and self-esteem--is access to the colony records, rotting away in the attic for decades. But when Doug begins to poke around where he shouldn't, he finds Gracie guards the files with a strange ferocity, raising questions about what she might be hiding. The secrets of the hundred-year house would turn everything Doug and Zee think they know about her family on its head--that is, if they were to ever uncover them.
In this brilliantly conceived, ambitious, and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.
For readers of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle
Author Notes
Rebecca Makkai is an author, based in the Chicago area. She holds as MA from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English and a BA from Washington and Lee University. She was an elementary Montessori teacher for twelve years before becoming a writer. She is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. And she is the Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
She has had her short fiction published in such anthologies as The Pushcart Prize XLI, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Fantasy. She has a short story collection entitled Music for Wartime. She won the 2017 Pushcart prize for short fiction. Her first novel was entitled The Borrower. Her other novels include The Hundred-Year House and The Great Believers. She won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for fiction with her novel, The Great Believers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Makkai's (The Borrower) second novel is a lively and clever story starring an estate with an intricate history. It starts in 1999, with husband and wife Doug and Zee living in the coach house of Zee's parents' estate, Laurelfield, which used to be an artists' colony on Chicago's wealthy North Shore. Doug is a writer laboring to finish a monograph of poet Edwin Parfitt, a visitor to the colony, while earning money by anonymously writing YA fiction for a book packager. Zee teaches at the local college, scheming to destroy a tenured colleague to make room on the faculty for her husband, but her machinations take an unexpected turn. When Zee's mother's second husband allows his son and daughter-in-law to move in to the other apartment in the coach house, the dynamic of the group shifts. Meanwhile Doug discovers a secret about Zee's family that he can't share with Zee. The second section of the book goes back in time to the 1950s, when Zee's mother, Grace, was banished by her family to the mansion with her abusive first husband as punishment for marrying him. In the third section, set in 1929, the owner of the mansion wants to shut it down, and the colonists make plans to stop that from happening-a scheme by the colonists that Doug unwittingly discovers decades later. The book is exceptionally well constructed, with engaging characters busy reinventing themselves throughout, and delightful twists that surprise and satisfy. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Charmingly clever and mischievously funny, Makkai follows her enthusiastically praised first novel, The Borrower (2011), with an intriguingly structured tale each section takes a step back in time set on a fabled, possibly haunted estate north of Chicago. After the alleged suicide of its beautiful first matriarch, Laurelfield was turned into an artists' colony in 1906 and thrived until an even more mysterious turn of events led to the property's return to strictly private use. Now, at the turn of the twentieth century, Zee, a Marxist English professor who grew up in Laurelfield, is living in the coach house with her jobless husband, Doug, who is supposed to be working on a book about a former artists' colony resident. Not only does Zee's imperious mother inexplicably stonewall his research, but Zee's batty stepfather also invites his unemployed son and artist daughter-in-law to live in the coach house. Such close quarters provide the perfect setup for farce and scandal, and Makkai choreographs both in a dazzling plot spiked with secrets and betrayals hilarious and dire. Her offbeat characters and suspenseful story could have added up to a stylish romp. Instead, Makkai offers that and much more as she stealthily investigates the complexities of ambition, sexism, violence, creativity, and love in this diverting yet richly dimensional novel.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A PATH APPEARS: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. (Vintage, $15.95.) Kristof, a New York Times columnist, and WuDunn, his wife and a former business editor at the paper, outline ways to improve the lives of the less fortunate, with concentration on those that bring demonstrable results. Though humans may be biologically hard-wired for empathy, the authors direct convincing appeals even to the calculating egotists among us. WOLF IN WHITE VAN, by John Darnielle. (Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) After a gruesome accident leaves him disfigured as a teenager, Sean Phillips largely withdraws from society and develops an intricate choose-your-own-adventure game played through the mail. The contours of Sean's inner life structure this novel, which our reviewer, Ethan Gilsdorf, called "a stunning meditation on the power of escape." DATACLYSM: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity - What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves, by Christian Rudder. (Broadway, $16.) The author, a co-founder of the dating website OkCupid, saw an "irresistible sociological opportunity" in the troves of data the site has collected. He uses it to identify trends in our behavior and preferences, including how we connect and what drives us apart. THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE, by Rebecca Makkai. (Penguin, $16.) At the outset of this novel, Zee, a Marxist scholar, and her husband, Doug, have moved into the carriage house of her family's historic estate, which once housed an artists' colony. Doug's academic career has stalled, but after realizing the obscure poet he is studying once visited the colony, he delves into the estate's past, turning up a century of overlapping histories, family secrets and ghosts. THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, by Rick Perlstein. (Simon & Schuster, $21.) Dealt blows by the defeat in Vietnam and Watergate's corruption revelations, the nation's self-image reached a low point between 1973 and 1976. As America seemed poised for self-reflection and humility, Ronald Reagan (and his signature buoyancy) entered the political scene. Perlstein's engaging account considers Reagan's influence on the modern conservative movement and its "cult of official optimism." HONEYDEW: Stories, by Edith Pearlman. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) A perceptive witness to intimacy and solitude, Pearlman captures rhythms of daily life in her collection, which has been nominated for a National Book Award. Our reviewer, Laura van den Berg, praised the author's "quiet, humble precision," noting that these tales "excel at capturing the complex and surprising turns in seemingly ordinary lives." MADEMOISELLE: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, by Rhonda K. Garelick. (Random House, $20.) Chanel is often credited with creating a timeless aesthetic, but Garelick shows how the designer's enduring relevance is intimately tied to European politics and history.
Kirkus Review
Two married couples find themselves cohabitating in a guesthouse on the richand possibly hauntedestate of Laurelfield, once an artist and writers colony.In her sophomore novel (The Borrower, 2011), which starts in 1999 and rewinds in four parts through the decades to 1900, Makkai takes us on a tour of the house's power over its owners and the artist residents of decades past. She first closely follows the marriage of Doug and Zee, which has been upended by financial concerns and unfulfilled career ambitions. Cash-strapped, they have moved to a house on Zees mothers estate in order for Doug to finish his monograph on the poet Edwin Parfitt, who was luckily once a resident of the artists colony. But secretly, instead of doing his work, Doug is writing books in a formulaic middle-grade series for a couple of grand a pop. Zee, a Marxist theorist in the English department at the local college, is desperate to get her husband a job and sabotages the career of a curmudgeonly older professor in hopes that Doug will get his spot. Meanwhile, the owner of the estate, Zees mother, Grace, allows her second husband's son, Case, and daughter-in-law, Miriam, to move into the guesthouse with Doug and Zee, further weakening an already fraying relationship. These guests of Laurelfield are complex, trapped not only by the estate, which has a complicated history and dark secrets of its own, but by their own problems and decisions; as Makkai explains, They had come to Laurelfield to face their lives and their marriage and the end of the millennium. Any number of explosive things.Makkai strikes a smartly absurdist tone as her characters nervously await impending doom from the uneventful Y2K bug, but while the novel is both funny and smart at times, Makkai fails to make the estate the foreboding character it needs to be to both ground and uproot these privileged characters who can't see how lucky they are and how self-absorbed their lives have become. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Makkai's second novel is decidedly not sophomoric; it's a daring takeoff from her entertaining debut, The Borrower. Beginning in 1999 and retreating backward in time to 1900, it chronicles a century in the life of Laurelfield, an estate near Lake Michigan, north of Chicago. The author opens with the ghost story of Violet -Devohr, who allegedly killed herself in the attic. Now Zee, Violet's great-granddaughter, is slowly going mad herself. The book takes off in subsequent chapters, and we see how Violet's ghost-or maybe the house itself-affected its inhabitants, many of whom visited for extended periods when Laurelfield served as an artists' colony from the 1930s to the 1950s. Slowly, readers get more clues about the mystery at the book's core, understanding the characters' interconnections. -VERDICT This novel is stunning: ambitious, readable, and intriguing. Its gothic elements, complexity, and plot twists are reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Chilling and thoroughly enjoyable. [See Prepub Alert, 1/10/14.]-Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 Rebecca Makkai 1 For a ghost story, the tale of Violet Saville Devohr was vague and underwhelming. She had lived, she was unhappy, and she died by her own hand somewhere in that vast house. If the house hadn't been a mansion, if the death hadn't been a suicide, if Violet Devohr's dark, refined beauty hadn't smoldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn't have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can't all afford to be ghosts. In April, as they repainted the kitchen of the coach house, Zee told Doug more than she ever had about her years in the big house: how she'd spent her entire, ignorant youth there without feeling haunted in the slightest--until one summer, home from boarding school, when her mother had looked up from her shopping list to say, "You're pale. You're not depressed, are you? There's no reason to succumb to that. You know your great-grandmother killed herself in this house. I understand she was quite self-absorbed." After that, Zee would listen all night long, like the heroine of one of the gothic novels she loved, to the house creaking on its foundation, to the knocking she'd once been assured was tree branches hitting the windows. Doug said, "I can't imagine you superstitious." "People change." They were painting pale blue over the chipped yellow. They'd pulled the appliances from the wall, covered the floor in plastic. There was a defunct light switch, and there was a place near the refrigerator where the wall had been patched with a big square board years earlier. Both were thick with previous layers of paint, so Doug just painted right on top. He said, "You realize we're making the room smaller. Every layer just shrinks the room." His hair was splattered with blue. It was one of the moments when Zee remembered to be happy: looking at him, considering what she had. A job and a house and a broad-shouldered man. A glass of white wine in her left hand. It was a borrowed house, but that was fine. When Zee and Doug first moved back to town two years ago, they'd found a cramped and mildewed apartment above a gourmet deli. On three separate occasions, Zee had received a mild electric shock when she plugged in her hair dryer. And then her mother offered them the coach house last summer and Zee surprised herself by accepting. She'd only agreed to returned home because she was well beyond her irrational phase. She could measure her adulthood against the child she'd been when she lived here last. As Zee peeled the tape from the window above the sink and looked out at the lights of the big house, she could picture her mother and Bruce in there drinking rum in front of the news, and Sofia grabbing the recycling on her way out, and that horrible dog sprawled on his back. Fifteen years earlier, she'd have looked at those windows and imagined Violet Devohr jostling the curtains with a century of pent-up energy. When the oaks leaned toward the house and plastered their wet leaves to the windows, Zee used to imagine that it wasn't the rain or wind but Violet, in there still, sucking everything toward her, caught forever in her final, desperate circuit of the hallways. They finished painting at two in the morning, and they sat in the middle of the floor and ate pizza. Doug said, "Does it feel more like it's ours now?" And Zee said, "Yes." At a department meeting later that same week, Zee reluctantly agreed to take the helm of a popular fall seminar. English 372 (The Spirit in the House: Ghosts in the British and American Traditions) consisted of ghost stories both oral and literary. It wasn't Zee's kind of course--she preferred to examine power structures and class struggles and imperialism, not things that go bump in the night--but she wasn't in a position to say no. Doug would laugh when she told him. On the bright side, it was the course she wished she could have taken herself, once upon a time. Because if there was a way to kill a ghost story, this was it. What the stake did to the heart of the vampire, literary analysis could surely accomplish for the legend of Violet Devohr. Excerpted from The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
