The Life Of Houses

by Lisa Gorton

The Life of Houses is the new novel by the acclaimed poet Lisa Gorton, whose first book of poetry, Press Release, won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and whose second collection, Hotel Hyperion, was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.


The Life of Houses explores, with a poet’s eye for detail, the hidden tensions in an old established Australian family that has lived for generations in a large house in a coastal town in south-eastern Australia. These tensions come to the surface when the granddaughter Kit is sent by her mother to spend a holiday with her grandparents, and the unmarried aunt who looks after them, in their old and decaying house by the sea. Kit barely knows them, because her mother is estranged from the family and never talks to or visits them. Recently divorced from Kit’s father, she sends her daughter to her parents now so she can pursue an affair with her new lover. Kit’s presence brings the old quarrels to life as family memories take hold of the present, brought to a flashpoint by the anger and resentment of Kit and her mother, and the dementia and sudden illness of her grandparents.
The Life of Houses is written in an extraordinarily expressive and dynamic prose that makes use of the close focus and the oblique perspectives that Gorton has mastered so successfully in her poetry. It is a style reminiscent of Henry James and Patrick White, a high style, perfectly suited to the social decorum and inhibition of her socially elevated but unhappy subjects.

Genres: Australia

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2015

About the author

Lisa Gorton lives in Melbourne. Her first poetry collection, Press Release, was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award and the Mary Gilmore Award, and won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Lisa completed a doctorate at Oxford University on John Donne’s poetry and prose, winning the John Donne Society Award for Best Publication in Donne Studies. She received the inaugural Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Her novel for children, Cloudland, was one of The Age Books of the Year in 2009.

Reviews

[Debbie Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a reader, I’m a traveller. I seek the unfamiliar. So when I read a review of The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton and there was mention of a mother daughter relationship, I nearly didn’t read it. As a mum with a daughter this is familiar territory for me but still I was drawn to The Life of Houses, especially the claim that the book “is written in a uniquely expressive and dramatic style that makes use of the close focus and unexpected perspectives that Gorton has mastered so effectively in her poetry.” I haven’t read Gorton’s poetry but hope to soon. As for her prose, it is definitely written in a unique style.
Being in my fifties and and, of course a Mum, I was pretty sure that I would find myself aligning with Anna, the mother. However, that wasn’t the case. For me, Anna is an interesting but very frustrating character - she withholds love, information and ultimately herself and I just couldn’t feel much sympathy for her. As a result the sections with Kit really sing for me as do all the places, particularly the decaying house by the sea, that the characters inhabit. A fascinating, original novel.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually started reading this novel last year and gave it away because I found the poetic prose so intense that it overshadowed both character and narrative. I also found one of the main character's introspection irritating. I then read it for my online discussion group and got a lot out of it as a result - the usual story when different people put in their ideas about a book.

Anna is keen to have a week on her own with her lover, so she sends daughter Kit off to the 'Sea House' - a crumbling old home where Anna's parents are stuck in their history of lost privilege, which Anna has renounced. The 'life of houses' theme is shown through this rather gloomy and mysterious old house as well as Anna and Kit's home in Melbourne. Our discussion group members reflected on houses we've lived in (or still live in) and how the life of those houses affects us - or continues once we have left them. That is probably the best thing I took away from this novel.

Lisa Gorton is a poet (this is her first novel) and I found out that her poetry too has a preoccupation with houses, rooms, spaces and the way that these environments affect the people who live in or move through them. She has a strong visual sense and creates spaces and places vividly, including the old 'Sea House' and its environment on the south-east coast of Victoria. It is one of those novels that you can open at almost any page and find words used originally, precisely and powerfully.

So yes, I'm glad I returned to this book as it had much to interest me - but not enough to make me think I would ever want to read it again.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am undecided between 2.5 and 3 stars. The prose is beautiful and I was swept away by Gorton's words, but I felt the story and the characters, therein, very undeveloped and so the story itself, did not succeed in engaging me. I was interested in learning more about some of the characters, especially Scotty and Treen and felt let down when the novel ended. I am not one that needs loose ends tied up, but there was so much unsaid and unspoken in this novel (a reflection of Anna's family, itself, I feel), that it left me concluding that it was lack of experience as a writer of story's n the author's behalf, rather than a deliberate technical strategy. However, if the latter, it did not work for me. However, given I loved her prose, it is has left me intrigued enough to want to read some of Gorton's poetry.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book, it is so beautifully written that the storyline almost becomes secondary to the prose. Granddaughter to former Australian Prime Minister John Gorton, Lisa Gorton is a prize winning poet and this clearly shows in her writing. It took her 6 years to write this book and I look forward to her next novel. The house in the book is real, it belonged to her family once. The novel revolves around a fictional family living there and how pivotal it is in their lives and future. It is a soft and gentle book, with a tacit undercurrent of things not quite as they seem.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slow, beautifully crafted book exploring family and home and the fundamental hold they can have on us, no matter how much we try to separate ourselves. The writing is crystalline - it's not surprising that Gorton made her name as a poet - and the characters are complex, frustrating and, ultimately, human. It's not a gripping page turner, but if you let yourself sink into the world that Gorton has created, there's a lot here to enjoy.

[Cass Moriarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes a novel is presented in so still and quiet a way that you don't so much read it as inhabit its pages. The Life of Houses, by Lisa Gorton, is such a book. Gorton is firstly a poet, and this resonates strongly in her prose, which is spare, sparse and unassuming, while at the same time conveying a richly detailed depiction of a family and a house, their histories and their stories.
In order to have a week with her lover (after her husband goes overseas), Anna packs off her teenage daughter, Kit, to stay with her grandparents and aunt at the family home at the seaside. Kit has only visited once before, when she was very young; Anna has not been back to her home town for years. The dual narrative concerns Anna and her tryst with her lover, Peter, and the realities of domestic life once their partners are removed, and Kit's introduction to the strange life of her relatives, caught in a time capsule in a house rumoured to be haunted. As Kit meets people who knew her mother when she was younger, and visits the places that were familiar to her, her eyes are opened to the life her mother must have once lived, long ago.
A family crisis towards the end of the book brings everyone together, physically at least, and emotions are taut as the past is confronted.
This is a novel full of description of place: landscape, environment, nature, and of course, the family home, which is a character in itself. Gorton evokes the dusty, layered mustiness of childhood with an attention to detail that is absorbing. The house - its cold, dark rooms, its endless carpets and mats and doilies, its lowered blinds and shuttered windows, its inwardness and isolating qualities - is painted in a way that is eerie and forbidding, and yet oddly familiar. Intricate details are noted carefully; observations are keen; the heavy weight of time and history is relentlessly perceived. As much is said by the absence of words as by the presence of prose. A beautiful book.







Cass Moriarty Author's photo.

[Yoana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally done with this book. It's somehow both verbose and obfuscating, like it's a afraid of being thought too obvious if it tells what the hell is going on. Instead we get endless, tedious, and repetitive (glare, pale light, shimmering heat, "she thought it was strange that [insert boring observation here]") descriptions of the environment, people, and feelings. Everyone is pale, everyone's face is pinched, everyone for some reason has peculiarities on the skin under their eyes. Nothing happens and nothing is resolved.

The plot is so thin you can read (and enjoy better) a newspaper through it. A recently separated woman starts a new relationship and sends her daughter to her estranged parents for a week. Nothing comes of any of those ideas. The daughter, Kit, meets some people, learns of maybe a killing? Suicide? Accident? No way to tell or even suspect. And her grandfather has a heart attack. None of this amounts to anything because the characters are utterly undeveloped - where they should be showing us their character and motivations is instead a pile of sensory descriptions (paraphrased here): she felt weightless. The underside of his lids showed a watery red. The smell of terpentine filled her nostrils. A drop of rain slid cold down her spine. This is basically the whole book, plus scant dialogue which is just as elliptic. The style is pretentious and that would have been ok if we got something about the logic of the plot, character motivations, anything, but we don't. It's sterile and uninteresting, like a generic watercolour IMO.

[Philip Taffs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetic, poignant, beautifully wrought coming-of-age story.

Every sentence is beautiful: you can tell it's been carefully crafted by a wise, empathic poet.

Patrick White meets 'High Tide': the Judy Davis film.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Life of Houses, a debut novel by Lisa Gorton, is a quiet, sharply observant short novel. It centres on the interior world of two characters as they negotiate the demands of family from whom they are estranged.

Anna, a self-made woman with an art gallery, is about to break up her small family. Her husband Matt has just gone overseas, not knowing about Anna’s affair with Peter and that they plan to be together. In the interim, in exasperation over the usual teenage disdain, she sends her daughter Kit to stay with her parents from whom she has been estranged for decades.

The house to which Kit travels alone by train is one of those dingy old station homesteads. It’s been in the family for generations but is in decline – as is the family. Passing their days there are Anna’s parents, Patrick and Audrey, and her unmarried sister, Treen. (Such a grating name! It set my teeth on edge every time I saw it!). Audrey is grotesquely fat and barely able to breathe, but she is an old survivor who will be around to entrap Treen for years to come.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/10/01/th...

[Calzean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of poetic language giving vivid and moving descriptions of people, places and relationships.
Anna, the mother, sends her 15 yo daughter Kit to her grandparents. Anna is estranged from her family, is having an affair and is hesitating to move to the next step with her beau. Anna is artistically successful and seems to be rude to everyone.
Kit does not know her grandparents who live in a grand old house and property. They are old, eccentric and doddery. But they seem nice enough, as does the aunt, Scott an old friend and the neighbours. Kit seems very switched on, a bit spoilt and naive but accepting of people. Her story is the story of the book. But the star of the book is the beautiful prose.

[Wild Horses · Rating 2 out of 5]

I might have given this book 3 stars had it not been that I was listening to the audiobook and hated the narration. Grating and hideously slow, I had to speed it up to 1.25 or I’d have curled up and given up amongst those so very very frequently mentioned tea trees and oft referred to “missing sides of hills.” I did actually love the house though and the descriptions of how it was and what it represented so I suppose the title is accurate. And I certainly cared more about Patrick, Audrey and even Trine than the self-centred, careless Anna and somehow oddly dull Kit.

[Robyn Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moments of great beauty in the writing and a delicate take on childhood, what comes after and the pull of (and antipathy towards) familiar things. Well realised characters and some lovely renditions of the physical world they inhabit.

[Kyle]

Essentially concerned with the woe of a couple of generations out of an idly rich white family. It is unabashed in its unconcern for most outside of that; the drama does not come through. It is hard to care about above a level of oblique dislike.

[Sean Crawley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish this book. All the so-called beautiful prose more often than not obfuscates the intended meaning. My opinion.

[Michele Day · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read, enjoyed the lyrical writing enhanced by Lisa's knowledge of poetry.

[Itchy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Half way through chapter 21 I wondered what this book was about and realised I was bored. I put down the book. Two stars because it’s well written.

[Prudence Loon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful prose, just beautiful

[Jock Wilbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Original, poetic, memorable prose - highly recommended

[Zahra · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prose was beautiful and evocative but I wish there was just a bit more plot - not all loose ends need to be tied up but the story just felt a bit unfinished.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written. A very life-like story, in that there was no real climax. It was an exploration of the complex problems that a recently separated mother, Anna, and her distant daughter, Kit, faced when Kit visits her grandparents, who Anna has been estranged from, in a slow, coastal Australian town.

[Emilia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cool and distant sort of story. 3.5 stars

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetic.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very beautiful. Still. Powerful.

[Poit · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is so beautifully written. The language is so descriptive and intricate, I've never read anything that quite compares to it. The layers in this story are woven in so well. However, at times it "scene jumps" a bit which can be jarring. One must read into the next chapter a fair way to decipher where the story has gone. It can get a bit confusing and, as such, detached. It is a story where nothing really happens. But everything happens. I was just kind of left wanting more.