AMERICAN HOMES Ryan Ridge. University of Michigan Press, $16.95 paperback (114p) ISBN: 978-0-472-05258-5
Find a
job, get married, buy a house, have children. For most of us, this plan was laid out before
we were born. But according to
headlines, many of us are choosing not to get married or have children. According to headlines, Gen Y is renting
instead of buying. Yet the house is the
corner stone of the middle class American family. When I ask my students about the American
Dream, someone always says, “A house with a white picket fence.” While the specifics may vary, the significance
of basements and attics, of windows and driveways, offer common ground. Ryan Ridge’s American Homes offers a look at that significance through satire
and nostalgia. The book examines and
exhausts the home. And in doing so, it
honors, pokes fun at, and mourns the American Dream.
The book
is broken into three parts: Part III
(anatomy), Different Voices/Different
Rooms, and Ideas. Each explores American homes with puns, faux
history/statistics, and slips into the poignant. Part
III is a manual for American homes, detailing the purpose and history of
porches, doors, windows, roofs, etc. The
voice is instructional, and the matter-of-fact tone adds to the humor, using
statistics from the “Nu American Center for Statistical Analysis (NACSA).” The basement door is the scariest door
because, “in five homes out of ten, strange things happen.” When describing porches, it’s important to note,
“a person appears 40% more attractive with a cigarette in his or her hand.” Think Cortazar’s Instructions from Cronopios y Famas mixed with the
utilitarian voice of a Saunders short story. The narrator catalogues everything from the
bedroom door, “AKA Cupid’s Flap,” to garage sales, “Name applied to black
market items sold and resold (and sometimes traded) by American Homeowners in a
tax-free zone.”
The word
American is important throughout the
book. These are not simply referenced as
homes, but American Homes. Not just
driveways but American Driveways.
American Homeowners. And because all
good humor needs some blood on the floor, American
Homes also offers critique of America.
In the section on garages: “Since most American automobiles are powered
by foreign oil, it is necessary for the Land of American Homes (AKA “U.S.”) to
battle the Land of Foreign Oil (AKA “Them”)...”
Sheds are, “spiritual structures used for storage and hobbies and the
beating of disobedient children. Often
found in Backyards, American Sheds are not dissimilar to American churches in
that they provide comfort and solace…”
Porches belong to smokers, but once belonged to slave owners.
In Part III, the narrator’s voice
occasionally betrays the instructional tone, giving us a taste of the character
behind the “facts”. By Different Voices/Different Rooms, the
narrator gives in: “I, the Narrator, living in an apartment with no basement. I, the Narrator, visiting my parents’
basement in Non-fictionville.” Where Part III feels like prose, this section
feels like poetry. Where Part III is tighter, this section is
more unwieldy. The narrator knows we’re
in on the joke. The narrator is waxing nostalgic.
But the
faux history, the puns, and the humor are still there. We return to “quotes” and “anecdotes” from
presidents, musicians, writers, inventors, the ghost of presidents, and historical
figures. According to this history, when
Patrick Henry kept his wife in the basement to treat her mental illness, she
“originally coined the phrase Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.” And the ache of the American dream via the
American home is still present: “My own father kept his Vietnam War medals in the
attic until one Christmas my mother framed them and gave the frame to him as a
gift. Now the framed medals are in the
same attic, collecting dust.”
The book
ends with Ideas, which is exactly
what it sounds like: ideas about houses.
I imagine the narrator and his stoner buddies on porch swings imparting
their million dollar suggestions for home improvement: “Build an antenna with a
signal strong enough to pick up local singles without leaving your American
Home. *NOTE: This idea later became the
internet.”
Each
section is accompanied by the drawings of Jacob Heustis, which fittingly emulate
diagrams. However, there are smudges in the
corners, almost illegible handwritten labels, cartoon images. They lie between diagram and notebook doodle,
like our narrator in American
Homes, like many Americans making their future right now, between plans and
dreams. (December 2014)
Purchase
American Homes HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield is the author of the novel How
to Catch a Coyote. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Mississippi Review, Salt Hill Journal, Juked,
and others. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
