“A heartfelt chamber piece of flawed personalities, calamitous decisions and unexpected moments of grace.”
Description
In this “heartfelt chamber piece of flawed personalities, calamitous decisions, and unexpected moments of grace” (The New York Times Book Review), two suburban families are hopelessly entangled during an explosive Thanksgiving weekend that changes their lives forever.
When Benjamin’s wife kicks him out of their house, he returns to his childhood home in Connecticut to live with his widowed father. Lost, lonely, and doubting everything he felt he knew about marriage and love—even as his eighty-year-old father begins to date again—Benjamin is trying to put his life back together when he recognizes someone down the street: his high school crush, the untouchable Audrey Martin. Audrey has just moved to the neighborhood with her high-powered lawyer husband and their rebellious teenager, Emily. As it turns out, Audrey isn’t so untouchable anymore, and she and Benjamin begin to discover, in each other’s company, answers to many of their own deepest longings. Meanwhile, as the neighborhood is wracked by a mysterious series of robberies, Audrey seems to be hiding a tragic secret, and her husband, Andrew, becomes involved in a dangerous professional game he can never win. And, by the way, who is paying attention to Emily?
Powerful, provocative, and psychologically gripping, Housebreaking explores the ways that two families—and four lives—can all too easily veer off track, losing sight of everyone, and everything, they once held dear. Like the best from Tom Perrotta and Rick Moody, “this compassionate, utterly engrossing novel of suburban dysfunction…makes some trenchant points about how easily people can lose sight of what’s most important” (Booklist).
Reviews
“One of the beauties of being a reviewer is that every so often,one gets to discover an unknown gem in the dog-eared pile of books to be read. Housebreaking is one of thosegems. Dan Pope has created characters that the reader is unlikely to forget orto stop thinking about long after the book is finished.”
“Is there anything left to say about suburban family dissolution and the edgy temptations of adultery that Updike, Cheever, Moody, Homes, Perrotta, etc., etc., haven't already said? As it turns out, there is. . .Fresh rewards come with the strength of the storytelling…Dan Pope's steady prose and rich characters bring new life to the familiar story of a suburban family unraveling.”
“This work will captivate and immerse readers in a cyclone of emotion that could leave them short of breath by the last page. Not for the faint of heart, this realistic novel is an excellent portrait of flawed people, tragic circumstances, and the behavior that consumes them.”
