Book Review: Matt Bell’s In The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

As cliché as it may sound, Matt Bell’s In The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods presents an epic unlike any other that I have encountered, one that attacks conventions of love, marriage, and child rearing. Centered around the marriage of two unnamed protagonists, the tale follows their immigration from a faraway land, one beyond the mountain on a path they can longer quite find, to a patch of lakeside dirt. Unlike the typical novel of immigration, they move alone to an uninhabited land and thus face the themes of discovery, exile, and isolation alone. There is no city to transverse, no language to learn, only love to foster in their shared solitude.

It is here, next to the lake where the husband draws his fish and the forest in which he traps animals first for fur and consumption and later as an outlet for his internal angst, that the couple settles down, sculpts a house, and sets out to start a family. It is here they encounter the bear, a creature which always teeters in a stage of increasing decay and anger as it confronts the intrusion of the couple and everything it stands for. It is here that a seemingly normal land takes on a magical, if not surreal twist. We find a land where houses are not fixed structures, a land where animals can spring back to life in a harmless yet zombie-esque display, a land where a bears can shed their skins and humans can grow fur. Not that the novel is a work of fantasy per se, but rather a journey through a fantastical, fairy tale land more reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm than the benign, Disney constructs we see today. Plainly put, this land has consequences.

Familial creation comes at a cost for the couple, for as their failures to procure life mount with a series of failed pregnancies, the two become increasingly distant not only from each other but also from their past. As they integrate into the landscape, a power settles over them, a power the wife can use to sculpt and create—rooms and vegetables and locals but never life. The husband becomes consumed by the life that has failed to take full bloom, and the marriage descends down a path of darkness. Eventually, as the plot thickens and the world comes into full bloom, the descent becomes something deeper, all principal characters move into the earth searching out new hopes, loves, and worlds. Yet the new, as this family had already discovered, is precarious, ripe with mystery and not always better.

Written from the husband’s point of view, the novel tracks through their simple yet fantastical journey. Bell crafts prose that is deeply poetic and structured, prose that demands the reader’s attention as each and every word counts. The words, the themes, and the world is both moving and heavy. This book will make you think and this book will make you work, yet the payoff comes through the experience there in.

Favorite lines (normally I limit this section, but there were such gems this time around):

• “In both shapes he often revealed what he said my wife was doing wrong, and so began the long road of my turn against her, a difference from our recent past, where in my more temporary angers I had only turned away.”
• “That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones.”
• “There mother and son slumbered, his head laid to her collarbone, perhaps naked beneath white sheets, bodies as close as hers and mine once were.”
• “And how I wished it had been different, that I had not walked away at the beginning of our marriage, when I thought it would always be so easy to return.”
• “What I saw in the mirror was my dying, and how at last it was so near, so near I could always smell it, could put my fingers to my skin and feel it moving beneath, beneath and also within.”
• “For all my life, I thought that she was the receptacle into which I would put some seed of mine, make the family I wanted, but it was I who was the empty vessel, carved stubborn as stone, as unburnable as the moon, ready at last to be filled with fire and with the song.”

On Reading Flannery O'Connor's "Enoch and the Gorilla"

“Enoch and the Gorilla” could be titled the continued adventures of Enoch Emery, who O’Connor flushes out to be a rather complete character across the multiple stories he appears in. Enoch’s ignorant innocence is once again on full display, as he waits to meet Gonga the gorilla of Hollywood stardom. The gorilla represents Enoch’s continued desire to observe life’s childish oddities while at the same time attempting to appear stronger and smarter than he actually is: “To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of providence” (O’Connor 109). In confronting the gorilla, he can prove himself brave, strong, and intelligent, and thus he can come across as being truly human. By mocking the beast, he can appear to be better than it: “Enoch had got over his fear and was trying frantically to think of an obscene remark that would be suitable to insult him with” (111).

Thus Enoch waits, surrounded by children, hoping to insult a gorilla. What O’Connor fails to note, what keeps the mystery alive and well here, is whether the gorilla is real, or if the chained creature in a raincoat is a man in a suit. This omission, done so that we can view the world through Enoch’s myopic eyes, keeps the reader going. If it is an animal, one kids will fear touching, what good will Enoch’s insult do? Or if a man, does the situation even change? Enoch, confused and unsure shakes Gonga’s hand, giving the beast his life story before being told to go to go to hell with a sudden and shocking whisper than sends the man fleeing into the rain.

Enoch greets the embarrassment as a chance to get even. Knowing the gorilla to be fake, knowing his desire to be great, Enoch sets out to confront the beast and get even in a way. Enoch wants to make something of himself in the world: “He wanted, some day, to see a line of people waiting to shake his hand” (112). The line, which resonates with Enoch’s inner desires and character, reveals a man tortured to be great but languishing in inadequacy. Yet, the opportunity to reface Gonga, to become Gonga, stands out to Enoch as a capstone moment, one that will leave him forever changed. With these thoughts in mind, Enoch stalks his prey, and steals away as the beast, thinking, that as he ambles about clad in gorilla garb that he has finally become something specially. Yet the truth, the reality of Enoch, is nothing of the sort.

Favorite Lines:

“Enoch was not very fond of children, but children always seemed to like to look at him” (108). Speaks volumes as to his character and how everyone, even the most innocent, sees right through him.

“The gorilla appeared at the door, with the raincoat buttoned up to his chin, collar turned up” (110). The image speaks for itself.

Other posts on the The Complete Stories include “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Geranium,” “The Barber,” “The Wildcat,” “The Crop,” “The Turkey,” “The Train,” “The Peeler,”“The Heart of the Park,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “Enoch and the Gorilla,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” “The River,” “A Circle in the Fire,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  If the book interests you, please use the link in the first paragraph or click the picture to support my efforts when you purchase the text.

On Reading Flannery O'Connor's "A Stroke of Good Fortune"

“A Stroke of Good Fortune” confronts a popular O’Connor theme: the old south versus the new south. The former eats collard greens and has a long arm extending back into the slave ridden past, the former, has taken to the cities, and in doing so, has found civility. Ruby, the main character takes this theme head on in the opening pages, confronting the arrival of her brother home from war with distaste, for while he had seen the world, he would rather be in the faded town he originally hailed from. He wants collard greens, the comforts of home. But home represents everything Ruby has moved to divorce herself from.

She has married a Florida man, has managed to remain childless, and has found a new life. Ruby wants nothing to do with her Pitman past, striving to move forward and take claim of a new, cosmopolitan existence: “Where she wanted to be was in a subdivision…where you had your drugstores and grocery and a picture show right in your neighborhood” (O’Connor 96-97). She is happy in the city and hopes to move and advance on. Thus, she fights her past with every step up the stairs, struggling to catch her breath, struggling to be happy with her station in life, and fighting the trappings of age that are descending on her. She is a young 34 in her mind, much better than her parents, who seemed to be devoid of youth: “They had been dried-up type, dried up and Pitman dried into them, them and Pitman shrunk down into something all dried and puckered up” (99). They shrunk as a result of their surroundings, the very things that Ruby has shaken off. They had kids, she does not, they lived in Pitman, but Pitman had ceased to exist.

Each step up the four flights of stairs shakes Ruby. She consistently questions her mortality, while making pains to assert herself, to show her proper place in the world order, to show that she is better than in the others. In doing so, she seems desperate. She reaches out, repeatedly notes that children killed her parents, while also noting minor weight gain, shortness of breath, and the fact that her psychic, Madam Zoleeda, noted a long illness that would bring good fortune is afoot. From here, the plot turns on the fact that Ruby, the person who viewed children as the death of her, just might actually be pregnant. Are her ankles swollen, her midsection distended? Could Bill Hill have forgotten to take a precaution and turned Ruby into a mother? O’Connor confronts the psychological grotesque here: the horrors of a life one doesn’t want, the shock of harboring unwanted life within in you. In doing so, one can feel for Ruby, yet one cannot help but pity her in a loathsome manner.

Favorite Lines:

• “She was too tired to take her arms from around it or to straighten up and she hung there collapsed from the hips, her head balanced like a big florid vegetable at the top of the sack” (95).
• “He had little raisin eyes and a string beard and his jacket was a green that was almost black or a black that was almost green” (99). Fantastic description here.
• “She had expected Rufus to have turned out into somebody with some get in him. Well, he had about as much get as a floor mop” (95).
• “Her mother got deader with every one of them [children]” (97). Speaks of Ruby’s character to a fine point.

Other posts on the The Complete Stories include “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Geranium,” “The Barber,” “The Wildcat,” “The Crop,” “The Turkey,” “The Train,” “The Peeler,”“The Heart of the Park,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “Enoch and the Gorilla,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” “The River,” “A Circle in the Fire,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  If the book interests you, please use the link in the first paragraph or click the picture to support my efforts when you purchase the text.