HOUSEMATES: A Novel
by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Hogarth (Random House). 352 pages, $29.
EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG, a New York City native, now seems firmly rooted in Philadelphia, where she/they cofounded “a community hub for the literary arts.” Her connections to both cities are evident in her new novel Housemates. Her first book was The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (2020), a work of nonfiction about the “Rainbow Murders” of two young women killed while hitchhiking in 1980. One reviewer described it as “part of a new wave of books upending true crime tropes and pushing at the boundaries of the genre.”
Housemates is similarly genre-defying. In her acknowledgements, the author writes: “I did not write a historical novel about [art photographer Berenice]Abbott and [art critic Elizabeth]McCausland in part because it already exists”—a reference to The Realist, by Sarah Coleman. However, Eisenberg’s central characters, working-class Bernie Abbott from rural Pennsylvania and middle-class Leah McCausland from Manhattan, seem to have clear origins in the real world. The novel blurs the boundaries of several genres: contemporary lesbian romance (complicated by lesbian community politics), Künstlerroman (a narrative about the development of an artist), and documentaries about American regions outside the cultural mainstream. Bernie and Leah are described in the first chapter by an unnamed narrator who observes them planning a road trip together in a coffee shop in Philadelphia and wants to learn everything she can about them. The female narrator seems isolated and depressed after the death of a woman with whom she shared much of her life. The narrator says: “I’ll call her what they called me in her obituary: … ‘housemate.’” The narrator clearly belongs to a more closeted generation than twenty-somethings Bernie and Leah. The narrative viewpoint soon becomes that of the painfully self-conscious Leah. She is a freelance writer at loose ends, wanting to do something culturally important, possibly to compensate for her body, which has always been seen as fat. She sees her female partner Alex as a “real” journalist because she works for a local newspaper. Leah knows that in the past “a duo of photographer and writer [Walker Evans and James Agee] had driven around America for an extended road trip as it was then, with both photographs and words. … The idea was, fundamentally, that the sum of the two forms was larger than either form could ever be alone. The photographs were not illustrations of the sentences and the words were not captions for the images.” A hypothetical partnership between a writer and a photographer already appeals to Leah even before a golden opportunity presents itself. Alex and Leah belong to a lesbian housing collective that accepts Bernie, a photographer who favors an old-fashioned method she learned from Daniel Dunne, an eccentric professor who has fallen into disrepute because of his “inappropriate” behavior toward students. In several ways, Bernie does not meet the collective’s standards of “political correctness,” but Leah fears that she doesn’t either. Each character is shown to be isolated in some sense, yet Bernie unexpectedly finds herself the heir of Daniel Dunne, who has died from alcohol poisoning, whether deliberately or not. A call from a lawyer lets her know that he left her a shack in the woods containing all of his equipment and his cache of unique photos. This windfall provides Bernie not only with material goods but also with what she sees as a moral responsibility to continue Dunne’s work. Leah offers Bernie a deal: they can take a road trip through rural Pennsylvania and collaborate on a photographic and written record of their discoveries. Since Bernie has no car and Leah can’t drive, Alex allows them to use her car for this trip. During the journey, Leah, a sensitive butch, learns to trust Bernie, a self-reliant femme, and they come to understand themselves in relation to each other. They bring their different sensibilities to bear on small towns, Amish families, and local scenery. Along the way, Bernie teaches Leah to drive, and despite her intention to stay honest and loyal to her partner, Leah finds Bernie irresistible. The author’s wryly humorous observations about contemporary American culture suggest that most people’s hopes for the future are unlikely to be fulfilled. Leah and Bernie, however, achieve a kind of fame when their exhibit attracts respectful crowds and positive reviews. Like true-to-life visual art and well-chosen commentary, this novel seems to convey a kind of authenticity that now seems almost extinct. _______________________________________________________
Jean Roberta is a widely published writer based in Regina, Sas-katchewan, Canada.
