February 23, 2023

This is the House That Luke Built, by Violet Browne

I don’t really know where to start with this book, this brutal, gorgeous, funny, strange and loving story of loss and living, though there is an obvious comparison in terms with subject matter with Lisa Moore’s February, but Violet Browne’s This is the House That Luke Built—fiction born of the author’s own experience—is something altogether its own. Something that, I must confess, I don’t *get* in its entirety, but I’m going to speculate that this is the point, that there are element of Rose’s experience of loss and widowhood that are unfathomable to me, the same way that, I suppose, I once read Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work before I’d had children and missed the point altogether.

The novel is told in a series of vignettes moving back and forth through time, showing Rose early in her relationship with Luke as, with her two children and his son, they come together and make a family, baby Emily arriving not long after. We see Emily in 2013: “Every since her father vanished when she was fifty-three days old, Emily’s body has been gripped by a vibration at the molecular level,” an urgency she tries to satiate with tattoos, piercings, as she tries to settle with what was lost to her. 1994, as Luke’s boat goes down in a storm. 1980 with Rose in her father’s boat as a child, in Plancentia, NL.

Mostly though, these vignettes tell the story of Rose trying (and often failing) to pick up the pieces of her family life after Luke’s death, how time marches on, how her parents and her sister keep her going, as do her children, with their own needs and particular wounds that become clearer over time. But she ends up eking out some kind of a deal with the fates, that every year on the anniversary of Luke’s death, Rose gets to walk through the wall of the house he’d built for their family and find him waiting there for her, though it’s a deal she must pay dearly for—in exchange, she’s aging faster, losing years of her life, her teeth decaying, her skin losing its definition. Until eventually she’s asked for too much…

I love this book, just as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, full of gorgeous prose, and gutsy women, and so much love, even in the face of so much loss, maybe especially. Rose’s struggles to raise her kids and make a better life for herself are harrowing and awesome, and the flame that continues to burn for the husband she lost is sustaining, transformative, unforgettable.