Household by Deborah Gould
December 22, 2022 Jennifer Lunden, winner of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and a Maine Literary Award, has a book forthcoming from Harper Wave May 9, 2023. For her Read & Loved selection she highlights Deborah Gould’s novel Household. Lunden had this to say about the book:
Deborah Gould’s novel Household is a work of quiet genius.
The narrator, while gradually awakening to the escalating emotional abuse she is experiencing at home, simultaneously immerses herself in archival records as she excavates the lives of the generations who lived in her rural Kennebec County home and neighborhood before she did. This passion, combined with her close attention to nature and the world around her, keeps her spirit from being crushed by her mercurial and controlling spouse.
Gould, a master of nuance, has written a work of lyric beauty and social import. This deeply observed, exquisitely written gem is a new Maine classic.
Two Short Excerpts from the Book
“The first time it happened,” I said, “I nearly choked on my surprise.” I took a breath and shifted back in the seat, rested my elbows on the arms of the chair.
“And fear,” I added.
The door to the Hadley Middle School counseling office has a little rectangular glass panel just above and to the left of the knob. Through it I saw flashes of bright yellow, blue, and red as the seventh and eighth graders, weighed down by L.L. Bean bookbags, made their way to their lockers and their first morning classes. “Which first?” Cooper asked me softly.
“Oh,” I said, “surprise.”
I remembered the sharp suddenness of it leaping up into my throat like a startled deer, and then the spread of fear as I watched you uncoil and rise from your chair.
* * *
I stood up and went out the kitchen door into the shed, called softly to the dogs and took them outside with me into the dooryard; around the back corner of the house and across the north field through the whispery grass, through the gate and westward up the path.
I sat down right there, right in the middle of the old cattle lane, and wrapped my arms around my knees and held myself tight. The skin in the bend of my elbow smelled like dirt and sunlight; my lower ribs hurt whenever I breathed.
I rested there a long time, then lifted my head from my arms and looked straight down the lane and across Merrill Road to the double doors of the English barn: he would have left both sets of doors—eastern and western—wide open, I thought, would have pulled them hard to either side of center, left them spread during the day to catch the breeze that rose up from the river. It would have been easy enough, then, to drive his horses and wagons in one side and out the other, move from upper fields to lower in a single pass.
Mow the upper meadows in early afternoon, maybe, then urge the team out of the heat and down the lane into the shadow of the maple and birch, past the wall where the bittersweet grows and into the sun again, across the dirt of Merrill Road into the shelter of the English barn. Halt them—no backing, no tugging at traces, no pulling at offside reins—and drop the mower; their feet shuffling and thudding on the heavy barn floor as they sidestep over, over, so he can hitch up the rake, the smell of them thick and sweet to him, coats dusty and warm under his hands as he runs the lines, checks buckles and turnbacks.
Get, he might say, softly, flicking the reins on their high backs and rumps. Get. And they’d start out again, straight through the east door into the bright outside, harnesses creaking and shifting, adjusting to the weight and pull of the rake, straight through into the bright outside and into a long, slow swing up around the south end of the barn, right here, up across the road near the house. And Ellen might come out through the screen door and watch from the side porch; she’d rest her hands atop the railing and keep her eyes on him as he moved his horses back across the road, moved his horses back into the cattle lane and back up into the western fields.
The washing, she might then think, it is time to gather in the washing.
Household is available from Maine Authors Publishing.
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