YOU ONLY CALL WHEN YOU’RE IN TROUBLE 
by Stephen McCauley
Henry Holt and Company. 326 pages; $27.99
In Stephen McCauley’s eighth novel, You Only Call When You’re in Trouble, the main figure, Tom, is a suddenly-single gay architect living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who specializes in designing “tiny houses” for high-end clients. Throughout the book, the reader wonders whether a 600-square-foot guesthouse he designed for a couple in their tony Boston suburb will be realized. Despite its diminutive size, “Tom knew it was his Great Gatsby, his Starry Night, his final opportunity to build something that people might look at in the waning days of human existence and think, That’s beautiful.”
At 63 years old, Tom recognizes the unbuilt edifice, “gleaming, serene, and light,” as a magnum opus, “a masterpiece.” So frustratingly close to being realized is the dwelling that we, as readers, are ready to move in, inhabit its rooms, open the built-in drawers and cabinets, and see the views of the bucolic property through minimalist glass walls. And yet, ground has not yet been broken. It seems many relationships will need to be firmly cemented before the foundation can be laid.
McCauley’s characters are always conveying real-life truths that are every bit as valuable as the scientific facts, biographical details, or historical facts we find in nonfiction. For instance, Tom’s aging, hippie-esque, single-mother sister Dorothy is described early on as someone who has spent a lifetime “dodging bad news.” “What you don’t know can’t hurt,” she tells her daughter, Cecily, Tom’s niece.
But Cecily, a thirty-something untenured college professor in academic purgatory for having insufficiently rebuffed a troubled student fixated on her, rejects her mother’s advice. “Even as a child, Cecily had understood that there was something off in that logic. Ignorance is rarely bliss, although it’s true that a certain fuzziness about the nutritional details of French pastry makes it easier to enjoy a beignet,” McCauley writes, indicating, too, that no matter how serious a plotline of his might be, he makes room for humor.
McCauley is not an architect in real life, but, rather, a prolific novelist, with three of his books having been made into movies (The Object of My Affection, with Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, and Alan Alda), and a true literary star in France, where he is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He also codirects Brandeis University’s writing program, making him well equipped to relate the claustrophobic intolerance of academia in which Cecily is immersed, and which engendered the title’s namesake phone call. And yet, he constructs his novels like a master builder. No extraneous details, no confusing floorplans, just a series of interactions that are true to life, and to which we are all susceptible. People interact in natural ways, they fall in and out of love, stay faithful to one another or not, take risks or stay in place, accept aging or fight it, but there is never anything contrived about his characters. Just as the right house makes for a series of welcoming rooms, so, too, are the people who occupy his pages those with whom we want to share such spaces.
Following the exit of his younger partner, Alan, for a neighborhood dentist, Tom has become more aware of his age, his changed body, and the need to make better use of what time remains. Though he might sound nihilistic at times, Tom, is, in fact, realistic and reflective. Lobbying hard, for instance, with his difficult clients, with whom he has a long personal history, to get the tiny house built, Tom ponders his earlier days, seeing “himself as he’d been then: young, slim, more objectively desirable to a host of people. … He liked small spaces and preferred sleeping in narrow beds. He figured he’d do just fine with death.” Hence, his penchant for designing small spaces with big import.
The so-called “tiny house” is a phenomenon of our time, a response to diminishing resources, certainly, but also to the needs for some people to establish order and occupy a space that never overwhelms. McCauley writes expansive books with multiple characters experiencing real-life challenges, whether they be existential issues of love or illness or work. But readers are never lost, just engaged, reading about his fictional people while reading about themselves, too, for his books are that real. This book, like all of his others, is akin to a sound and inviting home. You’ll want to go inside and stay a while, for this is yet another example of McCauley’s ability to build a solid story.
David Masello is an essayist and feature writer on art and culture based in NYC.
