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The New House
A family of outsider artists roams the American interior in search of the New Jerusalem in David Leo Rice’s new dream novel, loosely inspired by the hermetic worlds of Joseph Cornell. As Tobias Carroll writes, “The childhood of Jakob, The New House’s young hero, is one unlike that of your typical coming-of-age narrative. His is a youth surrounded by prophetic dreams, religious schisms, and secretive conversations — plus some shocking scenes of violence. Rice’s prose creates a mood abounding with mystery and dread, and The New House would fit comfortably beside the likes of Michael McDowell’s Toplin and Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory in terms of disquieting portraits of sustained alienation.”
394 pages, Paperback
Published June 21, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 30, 2022
Intricate and meticulously crafted, David is at the top of his game here. The New House is a mystical dark ride into the heart of spirituality.
December 25, 2024
A very dreamy but unrelentingly dark and shocking story about a deeply unhinged child named Jakob as he is raised by his equally as bizarre parents. Amazing writing, David Leo Rice is awesome and sent this book to signed to me personally! Will keep an eye out for anything by him I can find.
August 4, 2022
A brilliant exhibit on buzzing polarities of imagination: madness and artistry; destiny and agency; waking life and dream. The New House gesticulates and thrives in the seedy in-between, a kind of bildungsroman of an outsider artist who must escape his fate to simultaneously realize it. Though really, Jakob—our pubescent protagonist—is really an "insider" artist, taking that which is outside of himself (dead dogs, dolls, scraps from the town dump), and internalizing them, creating wild combinations of metanarratives and psychogeography that join seamlessly with his consciousness. He finds the world outside himself and assimilates it into his own vision.
The New House has a wonderous, shapeshifting nature. Irreverant domestic scenes, revelatory musing on the nature of art and artist, hypnotic dreamscapes, and all forms of rituals jump out from the prose, building Jakob's meteoric rise. The novel pulses, surprising readers not so much with twists but with depth, passing through further layers of time and space. With a panoramic flourish, Rice can miraculously present the world of The New House—in all of its multifocal, multivariant realities—in such a way that we never lose track of the beating heart at the center. The confusion and desire and commitment to the world of the imagination, no matter the costs.
The New House has a wonderous, shapeshifting nature. Irreverant domestic scenes, revelatory musing on the nature of art and artist, hypnotic dreamscapes, and all forms of rituals jump out from the prose, building Jakob's meteoric rise. The novel pulses, surprising readers not so much with twists but with depth, passing through further layers of time and space. With a panoramic flourish, Rice can miraculously present the world of The New House—in all of its multifocal, multivariant realities—in such a way that we never lose track of the beating heart at the center. The confusion and desire and commitment to the world of the imagination, no matter the costs.
April 18, 2022
If you know David Leo Rice's writing style, you'll know going into this book that it's weird, twisted, horrorish, nightmarish, completely bizarro to the point of hallucinogenic -- and it won't disappoint. I struggle to describe it, as I struggle to describe most of David's writings, but if you're into the weird, wacky, and absolutely disturbing, then this one is for you.
September 7, 2022
My wife and I still talk often about the term “art monster”—first coined in Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, and introduced to us via Claire Dederer’s 2017 Paris Review article “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” (we don’t exactly have our fingers on the pulse, my wife and I). I get the sense that the concept has more or less entered the zeitgeist in the subsequent eight years, but for those who might not know, it refers to the willful, and arguably necessary selfishness inherent in making great art; the capacity to prioritize one’s creative needs ahead of friends and family, wives and children, even one’s own health and well-being—to put one’s work above all else. Author David Leo Rice’s new novel The New House is about many things (and most of them all at once)—a surrealist, Matryoshka multiverse both unto itself, and within the larger context of his overall body of work—but if there is a cynosure to be found, it might best be described as the genesis of the art monster. Through Jakob, the book’s young protagonist, Rice traces the artist’s journey alongside parallel, competing, criss-crossing, Gordian-knotting, and ultimately Möbius-looping lines, drawing on philosophy, art history, and the quixotic questing of the Jewish-American experience all in the name of putting the stuff of visions to paper and rendering as text the ineffable life of the mind.
While the idea of “spoiling” The New House feels akin to impossibility—like spoiling 3 Women or Un Chien Andalou, there’s only so much you can actually give away about the meaning behind someone else’s dreams—I will try here, as always, to avoid betraying such secrets as the book works to reveal in its own time. Rice is, first and foremost, a master of semiotic world-building, and much like with his marvelous 2019 tome ANGEL HOUSE, the town at the center of The New House unfolds like the inbuilt origami of a pop-up book, effectively recreating the sensation of the world opening up before a child’s eyes as he experiences it all for the first time. Jakob—on the cusp of puberty at the book’s outset—has existed almost exclusively in a reality of his parents’ design—homeschooled by his overprotective mother, shuffled around the country semi-regularly by his overbearing father, in search of some mystical safe space they both refer to as The New Jerusalem. But after a fateful trip to Trader Joe’s (simultaneously one of the book’s most profound, and funniest passages) wherein a bit of forbidden truth at last slips through all his parents’ precarious defenses, Jakob’s world begins to shift off its axis. Suddenly, every new person he meets, every new locale he visits, every new object he finds, is grown pregnant with significance—as though a secondary world has sprouted fresh from the whole cloth of his heretofore dampened imagination, just waiting for him to give it a name and put it to use—a tiny Adam building his personal taxonomy from the ground up.
Naturally, as Jakob grows older, learns more about himself and his surroundings, and begins to take himself and his talent for found sculpture in miniature more seriously, he persistently tests the limits of his ever-expanding known world. Along the way he meets Greta, the kindly proprietress of his town’s small museum who encourages him to stretch and grow as an artist; The Couple From Another Town, an ominous pair of socialite drifters who tempt him toward a life of fame and fortune in The Art World (a place symbolic of corruption which his parents have always warned him against, but to which he finds himself increasingly drawn all the same); and Wilhelm Wieland, the reclusive art monster at the heart of the town’s dark history, who takes Jakob on as an apprentice of sorts, and serves as both role model and cautionary tale with regards to his fledgling artistic ambitions. There’s also a snake that talks to him from inside the walls of his home, a pack of illiterate bullies that menace him from the town dump, and a stillborn sister he occasionally summons for advice out of his own bloodstream, among many other fanciful flourishes, but to try and unpack it all would be a fool’s errand (and, I think, entirely beside the point). The magic behind Rice’s writing is its vibrant interactivity; the way it morphs around whatever experience we bring to it, rather than demanding any one conformity of understanding. As such, the myriad connections, allusions, doublings, and superimpositions available within the pages of The New House are as limitless as any of our facilities for spotting them, and yours will almost certainly differ from mine.
As Jakob wanders amidst this seamless, rippling nexus of time and place, reality and fantasy, art and memory, moving through endless towns full of endless houses into endless basements inside endless dioramas of endless towns and back out and over and around again, ostensibly in search of conceptually unobtainable termini like success, or safety, or freedom, or peace, Rice’s core concerns grow into sharper and sharper relief: the way parents shelter children from the world with lies in an attempt to help them make sense of things that never actually end up making sense; the way the imaginary world of childhood, when properly nurtured, can lead directly into the imaginary world of an artistic adulthood; the way we all must fight for identity, artistic or otherwise, in order to seek out and define those conceptually unobtainable ends for ourselves, whatever they might be; the way it’s all of a piece—we are all of a piece—circling round, reinventing and reimagining ourselves, struggling for authenticity despite the ever-clearer understanding that it’s all been done before; and the way that only giving up, or selling out, or staying put—only stopping growing, stopping searching, stopping trying—is truly failing; truly death.
As if all that weren’t heady enough, there is yet another layer to all this—a meta layer that draws in the reader, the author, and whatever tenuous connections might exist between the two—as The New House takes its place neatly atop Rice’s increasingly hefty bibliography (amusingly, when I looked back at my Heavy Feather review of Rice’s ANGEL HOUSE, I saw that I actually used the same pop-up book metaphor to describe it as I did in the first paragraph of this piece. I’m part of the cycle too. There’s no way out). And indeed, for those already in the know, it will be next to impossible to read The New House without also reflecting upon ANGEL HOUSE, as both are essentially surrealist explorations of the limitations of place, the artist’s journey, and the perpetual reinvention of personal history. But this too is surely by design. Just as each of Jakob’s pieces in The New House represents a spiritual extension of the one that came before, so does Rice’s work begin to suggest highly self-aware variations on a theme. Not shy about crediting his influences, he draws on Derrida, Lacan, Buber, and any number of other critical heavyweights throughout both books, teasing out their ideas from opposite ends (and, not for nothing, making them a good bit more accessible to dabblers like me) only to meet himself squarely in the middle. Where ANGEL HOUSE was a sprawling thesis statement—one in which identity was fractured across a huge cast like the shards of a Magic Theater mirror and the town itself often felt like the central character—The New House focuses much more intently on its protagonist and his struggle to break free of constraints like setting, time, and circumstance; a classic bildungsroman where what we’re building toward was inside us all along.
And so where does that leave us? Or Jakob? Or Rice? The answer is not a fixed point, but rather a beautiful mirage just over the horizon—that mythical somewhere between everywhere and nowhere—the New Jerusalem. For all its Olympic swan dives into the intellectual deep end, The New House is an exceedingly generous and reader-friendly book that manages the neat trick of maintaining its metaphysical bona fides without ever losing track of its sense of humor (Jakob’s hilarious bouts of delusional grandeur and daydreams of being “on the cover of the museum’s brochure” (!) will surely ring embarrassingly true to any self-proclaimed artist in any medium). There is an inherent absurdity to the artist’s life that Rice gets at better than maybe any other author working today—of all that one gives up for it, and all that one does and doesn’t gain for one’s trouble. For what it’s worth, my wife thinks I should be more of an art monster (and I definitely have lazy weeks where she’s probably right), but I tend to subscribe to the idea that, if you’re really prioritizing your work, then whatever else you do, all of life outside the page is just fodder—grist for the mill. A more monstrous mindset than that is hard for me to even imagine, and I think The New House would agree. With its carrion soft sculptures and romanticized self-harm, it feels like a love letter to the art monster in all of us, and a reminder that however monstrous we become in the name of self-expression—in the name of creating something new, or meaningful, or “important”—something celebrated or saleable or indicative of our misunderstood genius—something that will survive us, and our children, and matter for generations to come—that sooner or later, the Earth will crash into the Sun and absolutely everything will end; that until that time, all we have is the search; and that only once we open our hearts and minds wide enough to make room for that reality can we truly get down to the honest business of making art for ourselves.
While the idea of “spoiling” The New House feels akin to impossibility—like spoiling 3 Women or Un Chien Andalou, there’s only so much you can actually give away about the meaning behind someone else’s dreams—I will try here, as always, to avoid betraying such secrets as the book works to reveal in its own time. Rice is, first and foremost, a master of semiotic world-building, and much like with his marvelous 2019 tome ANGEL HOUSE, the town at the center of The New House unfolds like the inbuilt origami of a pop-up book, effectively recreating the sensation of the world opening up before a child’s eyes as he experiences it all for the first time. Jakob—on the cusp of puberty at the book’s outset—has existed almost exclusively in a reality of his parents’ design—homeschooled by his overprotective mother, shuffled around the country semi-regularly by his overbearing father, in search of some mystical safe space they both refer to as The New Jerusalem. But after a fateful trip to Trader Joe’s (simultaneously one of the book’s most profound, and funniest passages) wherein a bit of forbidden truth at last slips through all his parents’ precarious defenses, Jakob’s world begins to shift off its axis. Suddenly, every new person he meets, every new locale he visits, every new object he finds, is grown pregnant with significance—as though a secondary world has sprouted fresh from the whole cloth of his heretofore dampened imagination, just waiting for him to give it a name and put it to use—a tiny Adam building his personal taxonomy from the ground up.
Naturally, as Jakob grows older, learns more about himself and his surroundings, and begins to take himself and his talent for found sculpture in miniature more seriously, he persistently tests the limits of his ever-expanding known world. Along the way he meets Greta, the kindly proprietress of his town’s small museum who encourages him to stretch and grow as an artist; The Couple From Another Town, an ominous pair of socialite drifters who tempt him toward a life of fame and fortune in The Art World (a place symbolic of corruption which his parents have always warned him against, but to which he finds himself increasingly drawn all the same); and Wilhelm Wieland, the reclusive art monster at the heart of the town’s dark history, who takes Jakob on as an apprentice of sorts, and serves as both role model and cautionary tale with regards to his fledgling artistic ambitions. There’s also a snake that talks to him from inside the walls of his home, a pack of illiterate bullies that menace him from the town dump, and a stillborn sister he occasionally summons for advice out of his own bloodstream, among many other fanciful flourishes, but to try and unpack it all would be a fool’s errand (and, I think, entirely beside the point). The magic behind Rice’s writing is its vibrant interactivity; the way it morphs around whatever experience we bring to it, rather than demanding any one conformity of understanding. As such, the myriad connections, allusions, doublings, and superimpositions available within the pages of The New House are as limitless as any of our facilities for spotting them, and yours will almost certainly differ from mine.
As Jakob wanders amidst this seamless, rippling nexus of time and place, reality and fantasy, art and memory, moving through endless towns full of endless houses into endless basements inside endless dioramas of endless towns and back out and over and around again, ostensibly in search of conceptually unobtainable termini like success, or safety, or freedom, or peace, Rice’s core concerns grow into sharper and sharper relief: the way parents shelter children from the world with lies in an attempt to help them make sense of things that never actually end up making sense; the way the imaginary world of childhood, when properly nurtured, can lead directly into the imaginary world of an artistic adulthood; the way we all must fight for identity, artistic or otherwise, in order to seek out and define those conceptually unobtainable ends for ourselves, whatever they might be; the way it’s all of a piece—we are all of a piece—circling round, reinventing and reimagining ourselves, struggling for authenticity despite the ever-clearer understanding that it’s all been done before; and the way that only giving up, or selling out, or staying put—only stopping growing, stopping searching, stopping trying—is truly failing; truly death.
As if all that weren’t heady enough, there is yet another layer to all this—a meta layer that draws in the reader, the author, and whatever tenuous connections might exist between the two—as The New House takes its place neatly atop Rice’s increasingly hefty bibliography (amusingly, when I looked back at my Heavy Feather review of Rice’s ANGEL HOUSE, I saw that I actually used the same pop-up book metaphor to describe it as I did in the first paragraph of this piece. I’m part of the cycle too. There’s no way out). And indeed, for those already in the know, it will be next to impossible to read The New House without also reflecting upon ANGEL HOUSE, as both are essentially surrealist explorations of the limitations of place, the artist’s journey, and the perpetual reinvention of personal history. But this too is surely by design. Just as each of Jakob’s pieces in The New House represents a spiritual extension of the one that came before, so does Rice’s work begin to suggest highly self-aware variations on a theme. Not shy about crediting his influences, he draws on Derrida, Lacan, Buber, and any number of other critical heavyweights throughout both books, teasing out their ideas from opposite ends (and, not for nothing, making them a good bit more accessible to dabblers like me) only to meet himself squarely in the middle. Where ANGEL HOUSE was a sprawling thesis statement—one in which identity was fractured across a huge cast like the shards of a Magic Theater mirror and the town itself often felt like the central character—The New House focuses much more intently on its protagonist and his struggle to break free of constraints like setting, time, and circumstance; a classic bildungsroman where what we’re building toward was inside us all along.
And so where does that leave us? Or Jakob? Or Rice? The answer is not a fixed point, but rather a beautiful mirage just over the horizon—that mythical somewhere between everywhere and nowhere—the New Jerusalem. For all its Olympic swan dives into the intellectual deep end, The New House is an exceedingly generous and reader-friendly book that manages the neat trick of maintaining its metaphysical bona fides without ever losing track of its sense of humor (Jakob’s hilarious bouts of delusional grandeur and daydreams of being “on the cover of the museum’s brochure” (!) will surely ring embarrassingly true to any self-proclaimed artist in any medium). There is an inherent absurdity to the artist’s life that Rice gets at better than maybe any other author working today—of all that one gives up for it, and all that one does and doesn’t gain for one’s trouble. For what it’s worth, my wife thinks I should be more of an art monster (and I definitely have lazy weeks where she’s probably right), but I tend to subscribe to the idea that, if you’re really prioritizing your work, then whatever else you do, all of life outside the page is just fodder—grist for the mill. A more monstrous mindset than that is hard for me to even imagine, and I think The New House would agree. With its carrion soft sculptures and romanticized self-harm, it feels like a love letter to the art monster in all of us, and a reminder that however monstrous we become in the name of self-expression—in the name of creating something new, or meaningful, or “important”—something celebrated or saleable or indicative of our misunderstood genius—something that will survive us, and our children, and matter for generations to come—that sooner or later, the Earth will crash into the Sun and absolutely everything will end; that until that time, all we have is the search; and that only once we open our hearts and minds wide enough to make room for that reality can we truly get down to the honest business of making art for ourselves.
October 12, 2022
The unconscious is structured like David Leo Rice’s language. David Leo Rice's writing has managed to invert the content of the conscious and unconscious while maintaining the recognisable symbolic structures that guide our understanding of the world. Consequently, there's a harmony that's better than logic to David Leo Rice's narrative and style. The accuracy of the coming of age narrative familiarises the very strange, the family and the desire to create. This is a book that builds out of our core reaction to an incomprehensible reality, that inverts and switches the content of our symbolic markers. Infectiously readable and beautifully realised.
June 6, 2024
“They pay to touch the weird without fearing that the weird will touch them back.”
Every creative/everyone should read this book. A surreal, but grounded, exploration of creation, purpose, fate, and all the fears that come with it.
Every creative/everyone should read this book. A surreal, but grounded, exploration of creation, purpose, fate, and all the fears that come with it.
April 29, 2022
Rice's new novel is a philosophically rich exploration of diaspora and the creative process. Its innovative narrative challenges traditional concepts of self and lineage. Through the main character Jakob, Rice looks at what it means to be a creator and, as a human born into this world, a creation as well. The novel's surrealism propels the reader through dreamlike imagery, intercutting it with moments of quiet beauty. As a friend and fan of Rice's work, I was fortunate to read an early draft of this novel. It provided me with essential context to his oeuvre and the art of surrealism. The New House's literary achievements are set on the foundation of a poignant story of self-actualization. Highly recommended!
August 5, 2022
Bildungsroman/jewish mysticism/exploration of art but besides that I think more of a piece exploring the self as a constant death and rebirth through a life and maybe even beyond. Accurate depiction of a Tyson meat truck as sinister murder mobile as well
April 9, 2023
"His father takes his son's hand and says, 'There's something called puberty, Jakob, which, depending on the circumstances can either be a kind of growing or a kind of rotting. With those boys, if they are as you say, I suspect it's the latter. It happens when you've remained in the town you were born in, and are about to transition into the final form you'll take in that town. When you'll segue from growing to dying, and, in the meantime, fixating with a savage desperation on spreading the nutrience you've absorbed from the soil of that town so that you might, in a diminished sense, live on" (34-35).
"I'd like to be nothing at all, Jakob thinks. 'Those boys,' his mother goes on, 'represent what most people, if we deign to use that inaccurate a term, in this world really are. Body-shaped sacks of sewn-together trash, basted with honey three times a day to keep their seams from showing. If 'school' is the word you'd like to apply to that, go ahead. But it isn't the one I'd use. Since you're done with your cookie, let's return to your lessons'" (41)
"he muses on one of his favorite questions, that of whether the room he's in now is 'the Trader Joe's' or 'a Trader Joe's,' one example of an infinite series, one dot in a line that goes on forever It's a question deep enough to knock on the locked doors of the sacred" (47).
"As he watches her cry while other grown-ups drift past in feigned ignorance, reaching around her to get what they need, he falls back through time to much earlier Trader Joe's visits, back when he was the one crying. He sees himself on the floor in the snack aisle, devastated by the news that he'd have to decide between peppermint and peanut butter Joe-Joe's, the world closing in, the sense that life could never be full enough to be worth living already oppressing him at age three, as he lay pounding his fists on the cold tile desperate to find a way to get both kinds of cookies at once, to never have to take one path and leave the other untried" (50).
"as Jacob has learned well by now 'time spent away from one's work is time fed into a pit" (113).
"Back when, as his mother put it, 'You are still too young to have developed the capacity for heretical ambition, and thus may be permitted, if only for a little while, to roam free in your own pristine interior, in the prime of the state that David Graeber codifies for us as pure play, before any cynical notions of gamesmanship have taken root" (135).
"I'd like to be nothing at all, Jakob thinks. 'Those boys,' his mother goes on, 'represent what most people, if we deign to use that inaccurate a term, in this world really are. Body-shaped sacks of sewn-together trash, basted with honey three times a day to keep their seams from showing. If 'school' is the word you'd like to apply to that, go ahead. But it isn't the one I'd use. Since you're done with your cookie, let's return to your lessons'" (41)
"he muses on one of his favorite questions, that of whether the room he's in now is 'the Trader Joe's' or 'a Trader Joe's,' one example of an infinite series, one dot in a line that goes on forever It's a question deep enough to knock on the locked doors of the sacred" (47).
"As he watches her cry while other grown-ups drift past in feigned ignorance, reaching around her to get what they need, he falls back through time to much earlier Trader Joe's visits, back when he was the one crying. He sees himself on the floor in the snack aisle, devastated by the news that he'd have to decide between peppermint and peanut butter Joe-Joe's, the world closing in, the sense that life could never be full enough to be worth living already oppressing him at age three, as he lay pounding his fists on the cold tile desperate to find a way to get both kinds of cookies at once, to never have to take one path and leave the other untried" (50).
"as Jacob has learned well by now 'time spent away from one's work is time fed into a pit" (113).
"Back when, as his mother put it, 'You are still too young to have developed the capacity for heretical ambition, and thus may be permitted, if only for a little while, to roam free in your own pristine interior, in the prime of the state that David Graeber codifies for us as pure play, before any cynical notions of gamesmanship have taken root" (135).
May 31, 2023
I can’t remember the last time I’ve dogeared, highlighted, and bookmarked so many pages in a novel. “The New House” has become an all-time favorite—an eerie, challenging, and delirious book that has burrowed into my thoughts like a seminal dream. It reads like the murk of limbic memory. And in parts, it reads like prophecy.
This is a fable about the headfuck of creation, and I want to press it into the hands of every artist, writer, and seeker I know.
Ancient mysticism collides with freaky Americana in a glorious mess through which Rice carves a precision-grade line between the liberating and the horrifying—two conditions that describe any creative endeavor, including faith.
There’s a moment when the hero fumbles his way to a definition of art as “the brute dragging of heavy objects from the world in which they already exist into the world in which strangers, ignorant of their origins, can admire them in comfort.” Because when it comes down to it, as one character observes, most of us “want to touch the weird without fearing that the weird will touch them back.”
This book touches back.
This is a fable about the headfuck of creation, and I want to press it into the hands of every artist, writer, and seeker I know.
Ancient mysticism collides with freaky Americana in a glorious mess through which Rice carves a precision-grade line between the liberating and the horrifying—two conditions that describe any creative endeavor, including faith.
There’s a moment when the hero fumbles his way to a definition of art as “the brute dragging of heavy objects from the world in which they already exist into the world in which strangers, ignorant of their origins, can admire them in comfort.” Because when it comes down to it, as one character observes, most of us “want to touch the weird without fearing that the weird will touch them back.”
This book touches back.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews