The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
My rating: 4/5 cats
“There ain’t no haints in Detroit.”
this is just a great old-fashioned family story with wonderful spirit and sympathetic characters; one part american historical, one part contemporary housing crisis, with ghosts, addiction, illness, and the myriad conflicts that affect a family over the course of their lives both together and apart.
the turner family consists of thirteen siblings born in detroit to viola and francis, now grown and mostly scattered, many with children of their own. their newest crisis involves their childhood home, and its staggering $40,000 mortgage, despite currently being worth only one-tenth of that sum. viola has gone to live with her oldest son cha-cha and his wife, “temporarily,” but her age and illness make it likely she will never return to the old house, and a consensus needs to be reached between her children about what is to be done with it, inspiring strong reactions both practical and sentimental.
the focus is primarily on the oldest and youngest of the turner siblings: cha-cha, weary, put-upon, feeling responsible for all his younger brothers and sisters, questioning his marriage, his memories, and his sanity as he begins to see both visions and a therapist; and lelah, divorced, secretly squatting in the old turner house, having been evicted after losing her job to the ripple effects of her gambling problem, determined to work it all out for herself without her daughter or the rest of her family ever finding out. she’s unsure of how to take the first step, just as she’d been when she moved back home the first time, after the collapse of her marriage where she’d
tried to figure out why she’d married Vernon in the first place, why she hadn’t thought of any other plan for herself. At the twenty-four-hour mark she sat up, a new question in her mind: what would she do now? She was twenty-two years old, and the only answer that came was work and raise your daughter. Now, back at this place, Lelah saw it had cost too much to aim for so little.
the remaining eleven siblings make appearances, some more brief than others, and francis and viola are also voices in the mix, tracing the family’s roots from francis’ migration from arkansas to the black working-class neighborhoods of detroit in the 1940’s, leaving viola behind as he struggles to navigate this new world and its temptations and the burden of his responsibilities.
it’s a really well-developed story of a family big enough to have their own mythology, and while it does only focus on a few members of the family, there’s enough revealed in anecdotes and asides that you get a sense of how the family operates as a whole, plus you have so much wonderful material about the gradual change affecting detroit itself, and i’d much rather have that than more people-parts:
The old Packard plant stood in more or less the same state of decay since the last time he’d driven by it – blasted-out windows, cryptic messages graffitied across the walls, the scars of past fires evident here and there. What depressed him more than the ruined factory were the houses farther up the boulevard that he’d coveted growing up, now blighted and abandoned. Those big houses, with their high porches so far off from the street, could have easily housed a family with thirteen children. Now the wide center islands on some blocks were so overgrown with weeds and grass, a child could hide in them.
there may not be any haints in detroit, but detroit itself is a haint, whose past haunts its present, and the turner house is the corpse in the middle of it all.
it’s a good story – there’s nothing showy about it, just good storytelling, a clear voice, and a confidence that the reader will stay engaged. and while it has some hard truths in it, it’s not some bleak tragedy, like that other book with many pretty daughters in the detroit suburbs, The Virgin Suicides. it’s made up of mostly small personal struggles as lelah and cha-cha forge their own solutions to their problems without the safety net of relying on their family – alone in the crowd, sometimes veering into the family curse as a result: It was a particular sort of Turner weakness: self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance.
it’s a really impressive debut, and i look forward to seeing what flournoy does next.
