The Red House by Mark Haddon

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Richard is a successful radiologist who lives with his second wife and a teenage stepdaughter. Richard has one sister, Angela, who has recently spent much time taking care of their ailing mother. After their mother’s death, Richard invites his sister and her family on holiday in a country house inWales, together with Richard’s own family. The siblings barely know each other now yet harbour deep resentments; their families have never known each other. It’s a standard, unimaginative scenario – put a bunch of strangers in a house together in the middle of nowhere and wait to see what happens. In the hands of a master storyteller a great many interesting things could happen – for example, this has been, of course the basic premise of a hundred thrillers. But in this case, in the hands of Mark Haddon, disappointingly little happens.

Haddon’s best known work The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was an astute sensitive look at a young Autistic boy’s life. With The Red House he uses the same sensitive eye on a set of people who barely have any defining characteristics other than their clichéd unhappiness with themselves. Every person in this book is depressed, and it’s all just terribly boring. When did it become interesting to write about depressed people living together, just being depressed? Jonathan Franzen did it successfully with Freedom – is this the sort of highbrow white middleclass angst-filled narrative that gains popularity because its audience is highbrow middleclass angst-filled demographic?

At times The Red House feels overwhelmingly heavy, leaning towards pretentious with phrases like ‘Dominic stared at the black grid of the uncurtained window. If only he could fly away’ and ‘ [H]e felt the giddy excitement of climbing a great tower and seeing the shape of the maze through which he had stumbled for so long.’ It beggars belief that Haddon is serious because he has taken every literary trope he can find and shoved it all into one ubiquitous country house. There are sexual secrets galore, hidden affairs, old lovers, the ghost of a stillborn child, teen angst of every kind, an oedipal son, a tormented born-again Christian daughter, the ‘mean girl’ bully. It’s understandable when teenagers are messy and broken by hormones, but here, every adult character is just as much of a depressing wreck.

Haddon uses multiple narrative points of view in The Red House. Each swerve of narrative perspective is sudden, unannounced and in no particular order or need. In addition, there are bits and pieces quoted from books certain characters are reading, phone calls and strings of text messages that imply a life outside of the house itself – albeit an equally broken and depressing life made so by sheer stupidities of the characters themselves. It’s hard to see the point in all this, besides the obvious repetitive snapshot of white middleclass angst. A firm resolution is never a necessity in any piece of fiction, but it’s all the more missed when even the dénouement is just more lingering images of depressed people.