Kristina McGrath's lyrical first novel tells the story of a troubled working-class family living in the shadow of Pittsburgh's steel mills in the 1950s and '60s. Ms. McGrath dispenses with traditional plot and narrative to create a symphony of alternating voices: Anna Hallissey, devoted wife, mother of three and household saint; her husband, Guy, handsome, mentally unstable and dogged by alcoholism and failure; and their youngest child Louise, the future writer, whose voice "will people the house that has wandered away from me."
Ms. McGrath's story is not unusual, but her treatment of it is. Her prose has the allusive beauty of poetry. In portraying her characters, she seeks metaphorical truths. Anna, at home in her cellar, has the nurturing qualities of earth. Guy is fluid and inconstant, like the bodies of water he is drawn to: "The lake was a copy of something he longed for in his mind. The touch of water, its thick brown silk . . . forgiveness, and mercy."
In Ms. McGrath's descriptions, housework is a consecrated labor: "The heat of the iron rose up . . . with the bitter clean smell of the clothes dipped in a bucket of starch." More than Anna's responsibility, housework is her means of atonement, "an act of forgiveness for what you read in the newspaper. . . . By having supper always on time, whether he showed up or not, she felt she forgave some great evil, or death itself, by the fact she went on with it."
Unlike hard-working Anna, Guy is a good-time fellow, "full of . . . malarkey" with a weakness for women and alcohol, and little willpower to resist them. Anna soon discovers, however, that her husband suffers from paranoia and delusions. He turns on her like an enemy, accusing her of vile behavior and treating her cruelly. "Was he dangerous or was he in pain?" she wonders.
For Anna, the meaning of "house work" is enlarged to signify the responsibility of raising her three children on her own. At first, banking on her skills, she does housework for others. Eventually she becomes the manager of three entire departments of home furnishings in a Pittsburgh department store.
What makes this familiar story of domestic woe, hardship and resilience compelling is Ms. McGrath's ability to make poetry out of it. She writes with tenderness and sensitivity. Her characters are illuminated by the meanings she finds in them. The novel has a static magnificence, which Ms. McGrath achieves at the cost of dramatic action and narrative sequence.
Ms. McGrath is not interested in action as much as interpretation. The main actions of the novel often seem to take ++ place off-stage -- like the final split between Anna and Guy, for example. We do not see it happen; we are given a synopsis, as Ms. McGrath begins to beautifully elucidate the long-reaching effects.
Nor is this a novel where action begets action. Like the elements of a poem, the characters are placed -- in a landscape, in a situation -- and we are given a tour around them, until we see them in all of their suggestiveness.
The danger of this kind of writing is a tendency toward tedium and portentousness. Ms. McGrath's ear is fine enough and her mind dexterous enough to avoid these traps. Her vivid elaborations bring her book to life.
The most compelling drama of the book is understated, even implied: It is the story of how Louise, who remembers nothing of her father's life with his family -- not "one word, the sound of his footsteps, not a single vision of his face in that house" -- nevertheless has chosen to resurrect and re-create that life in fiction.
As a child, both before and after her parents' divorce, Louise finds a congenial hiding place under the kitchen table, listening to women's conversations, which she absorbs before she understands them. She is her mother's daughter, imbued with her poetry and melancholy, charged with the need to tell the meaning of her mother's sacrifice: "My achievement, I am hers. I stand still beside her, racing, nesting into her. I am racing upward, climbing her, scrambling for my place. She is staggering under my weight, under my intentions."
During her youth, Louise knew her father as the "wildcat of the dad [who] roars up to the curb, the Chrysler door swings open, and his voice rolls out like a whale."
"This father striding toward us," she tells us, "was no pure galloping expression of joy but something concocted." Yet, at the age of 18, as Louise visits her dying father with her older sister and brother, the three siblings find themselves "suddenly bothered by love for our father, a strange tugged-at reluctance." This discovery is the source of this book, which is not Louise's recollection of her parents' past, but her loving invention of it, in which she tells us what she didn't know she knew.
Ms. Whitehouse is a writer who lives in New York.
Title: "House Work"
Author: Kristina McGrath
Publisher: Bridge Works Publishing
Length, price: 198 pages, $19.95