The Burning House

by Paul Lisicky

" The Burning House is an achingly lovely novel about the things that bind us together in this life and the things that pull us apart. Paul Lisicky has an extraordinary gift for exploring emotional nuance and the rhythms of desire. With this book he yet again asserts himself as one of the select writers who continues to teach me about the complexities of the human heart."--Robert Olen Butler"A vigorous, interior-driven narrative... Lisicky is a beautiful and powerful writer; his prose has a palpable energy that demands close attention...."-- Publishers Weekly "An extraordinary fiction in that it sustains a believable poetic voice throughout... Lisicky's longer prose piece...often feels like a long, beautiful narrative poem about what it is to be flawed and human in a world that often seems, at best, indifferent." -- The Boston Globe The new house ate up every square foot of its lot. Copper roofing, copper flashing, copper every last detail crying out, notice me, notice me, keep up with me. Exactly the kind of house Joan would have despised, with good reason. In this captivating family saga, narrator Isidore Mirsky finds his close-knit family and community suddenly coming apart. Facing the illness of family members and the loss of homes in a recession-plagued urban town, he also contends with an overwhelming new desire--his feelings for his wife's sister. The Burning House finds its narrator at his most vulnerable, and explores what it means to be a good man amidst chaos.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder . Lisicky maintains a highly active schedule with readings and book signings, and connects with his readership through Facebook and his blog. He lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island, and teaches at New York University. A collection of short prose pieces, Unbuilt Projects , is forthcoming in 2012.

Genres: Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2011

About the author

PAUL LISICKY is the author of The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He has taught in the writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers University-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. .

Reviews

[Myfanwy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Isidore Mirsky, the narrator of Paul Lisicky’s gorgeous novel The Burning House, desperately wants to be a good man. He loves his wife. He loves where he lives. He wants to do good work. He wants a purpose. He wants to be good. The problem is that Isidore doesn’t really know who he is anymore outside of his lusts and fears and indiscretions. Indeed, it seems he has lost the ability to function in the moment.

Even as he feels his wife, Laura, falling away from him into illness, he also pushes her away–out of fear, and, ultimately, lust. The one person who brings Isidore back to life is his sister-in-law, Joan. It is as if the two women are halves of one perfect woman for Isidore–a person who has never existed and can never exist.

Told in gorgeous, hypnotic language, we follow Isidore through his travails and hope that he will come back to living within the moment, which he does. For in the end, after all seems lost, it is Isidore who is found as he listens to his wife sing once more:

"So she lets go and gives voice to everything coming at her: the love on the way, the love left behind. And good health. The possibilities. What more could a good man want? And how very nice for the weary traveler, who’s had enough of the same old thing, who could stand a little refreshment every now and then."

It’s a beautiful book. Read it.

[Jim Breslin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Lisicky writes beautiful prose. This is the story of Isidore, a delicate loving man who is a bit lost in life. He loves his wife but has an affair. He also covets his wife's sister. He meanders through houses that are being constructed in his town, attends meetings as townspeople try to stop the construction of town homes.

At times, it's not an easy book to follow - the plot is amorphous - you are left to read between the lines. Isidore doesn't speak about his issues directly, the reader has to work to read between the lines. There's a few times I went back to re-read a section to insure I understood. But that's all good because since in literary fiction all the questions are not supposed to be answered for us, right? :)

The prose is lyrical and insightful, such as this passage from page 111, where Isidore says:

I needed to fight myself, lest I give in too easy to that part of me I already hated: the one who'd settle for the drab, easy life at the cost of his soul.

It's an interesting quick read at 126 pages.

[Sana · Rating 3 out of 5]

We read the novel for class and I have to say the narrative was very poetic . However, Isidore was a man struggling to do the right thing...like not sleeping with his sister-in-law. He seemed like a coward to me from beginning to end.

[Ryan Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick fun read. Lisickys writing is attentive, hilarious, and engaging. It’s fun to see Isidore slowly unravel his life and ultimately implode. You want to root for him, you truly do. But it’s enticing going against his internal dialogue that consistently tries to make himself out to be a good man with his actions, when he’s just not.

You don’t cheat on your wife, have blatant feelings for your sister-in-law, and vandalize property/attend housing zoning law meetings in support of the people around you and hope it rids you of your issues. That’s not how it works, as much as one’s mind believes it does.

Lessons can be learned from this book thankfully. You can’t hide from your own personal issues and expect to change & help people, while attempting to justify ethically erroneous things. It doesn’t matter, deep down in your soul, how much you truly care about people. Fix your own shit before you burn everyone up in your trail.

A good change of pace after reading McGahern too. I guess infidelity is a step-down tone-wise from systemic sexual abuse in familial and religious structures. I wonder what’ll be next for me…

[BookChampions · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past year I've been making my way through Paul Lisicky’s memoir writing, but this month I took a little detour into his fiction.

This small novel from 2012 is poetic and insightful, tightly crafted but passionate. There was something timeless about Lisicky’s prose, both stylized and full of life. I would have spent much longer with these sympathetic and flawed characters. I can't wait to read his debut novel, *Lawnboy*, next. I learn something about writing from Paul every damn time.

*The Burning House* is about modern marriage and knowing your purpose, especially when you lose your one true north. It's about trying to be a good man (and there are so many horrible ones out there). But Isidore Mirsky is trying. He is navigating new desires (for his wife's sister) alongside longstanding ones (for his wife). He is flailing but on fire.

*The Burning House" is about loving another and not losing ourselves. It's about keeping the house of cards from crashing down on your world and the people you love. It was a damn good read.

[Kevin Catalano · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the cover of Paul Lisicky's Burning House, Jayne Anne Phillips blurbs, "A pitch-perfect gem of a novel." When I first read that, I wondered how a novel could be a "pitch-perfect gem." Having finished this, I get it.

Isidore Mirsky, the narrator of the novel, is a man in trouble -- existential and emotional. "If only I could talk with such ease when I was genuinely telling the truth. Telling the truth, I only sputtered and left spastic lapses in my sentences in some effort to find the right word. Then the word I settled on tended to be less than the one I'd hoped for, less than spectacular. Why should it be so much harder to be myself?"

Everything Isidore hears, sees, tastes, and feels shows us his struggle, as described exactly by the author: "I pictured my eagerness to please as a living thing, with brittle legs: stupid and shiny as a wood tick. It crawled outside the room toward a dog, a human ankle, a creature to feast on. It wanted to be fat with it, to swell with blood." And notice how much this description tells us about the narrator: "I looked down at my emptied plate. The yellow from the busted yolks looked deadly, a little vicious, difficult to clean."

Every sentence is a marvel, as though Lisicky discovered (or invented) the only right way to describe a detail or feeling. Paul Lisicky was once my superb writing instructor; reading this novel felt like being in his classroom once again. I have a lot yet to learn.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I review Paul Lisicky’s new novel, The Burning House, in the May 31, 2011, edition of The Boston Globe.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articl...

--Joe

The National Book Critics Circle chose my Boston Globe review of Paul Lisicky’s novella “The Burning House” as an exemplary review. It’s now at Powell’s on the “Review-a-Day” page.

http://www.powells.com/review/2011_06_22

--Joe

[Carol Ciavonne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The prose is beautiful to read, with so many brief but startling insights. All the more intriguing, as the narrator is both aware and supremely unaware of who he is and what is going on in his life. He lies to others, but also to himself, and yet I could not help caring about him and seeing him as he wants to be seen, a good man. This is the first of Paul Lisicky's books I have ever read, and I intend to read more because the work is literature... it's not just well-written; it's beautiful.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novella centered on the narrator's lust for his wife's sister and ordinary events in a small town fighting over a housing development and the threats to a home brought on by the narrator's confused desires, yet steadfast decency. The writing is interesting and fresh, though the narrator's mental leaps into fantasy and the past were at times confusing (even to the narrator, it seemed).