A Road Trip Novel for the Ages
At the start of Housemates (Hogarth, $29), by Emma Copley Eisenberg, intelligent and ambitious Leah McCausland is tired of writing papers for her grad program and profiling lesbian haunted houses for a Philadelphia weekly. She’s looking for a story to tell, “A big story on a big scale. … She would tell it so blazingly well and with such unabashed force and nuance that no one would be able to look away.” And as a twentysomething liberal arts student with an interest in social justice, Leah’s daydream conscientiously acknowledges her identities: “She would be so young and so fat and so gay but also so talented, like Truman Capote maybe, except she wouldn’t flame out or drink herself to death.” This passage could serve as a neat summary of the novel: important ideas about art and its effects, delivered with force and sly humor.
Flush with grant money, Leah decides she’ll find her longed-for big story traveling around Pennsylvania. And she’s convinced that her new housemate, barista/ photographer Bernie, would make the perfect collaborator, even though Bernie is “impulsive, selfish, withholding, a teller of half-truths, and always broke,” according to Leah’s girlfriend, Alex (also a housemate).
Bernie, the one-time protégé of disgraced photographer Daniel Dunn, is talented but volatile, and uninterested in Leah’s plan. But when she unexpectedly inherits Dunn’s photos and negatives, necessitating a trip to his rural Pennsylvania home, Bernie agrees to accompany Leah and document their road trip with her eye-catching and labor-intensive large-format camera. Thus begins their love story, and a meditation on art, mentorship, fatness, and community. (Leah and Bernie’s project is titled Changing Pennsylvania, a nod to Changing New York, a collaboration between the American photographer Berenice Abbott and her partner, art critic and writer Elizabeth McCausland.)
Eisenberg’s approach to her themes is straightforward: “The teaching of art is a particular thing with a particular ability to give life and to inflict damage,” notes Housemates’s nameless narrator, an older woman—also an artist and lesbian—who occasionally appears to address the reader directly. “This is not about an older artist who destroys the career of a promising young female student with his weakness and lust. This is instead about what it means to have been taught what constitutes good art by someone who does not believe in your full humanity and it is about what you do with that experience— forever—once you have lived with it.”
There’s an unusual formality to Eisenberg’s prose, with its sudden interruptions of Leah or Bernie’s point of view and the eschewing of dialogue tags other than “said” and “asked.” This gives some of the exchanges a deadpan quality; even the house cat’s contributions are rendered, “Meow meow, said Jigger.”
But Eisenberg’s insights into her characters and their feelings are conversational and evocative, sharp and affectionate: “When Bernie saw her, usually around dinnertime, Leah was almost always disappointed in herself,” Eisenberg writes. And when Bernie thinks about the American flag, she realizes, “The flag felt … like something that was supposed to be hers but wasn’t, like a sweatshirt from a school where you’d had a bad time.”
Eisenberg’s depiction of Leah is particularly skillful. Sociable and poised, Leah is queer and non-binary, but most of all she’s fat, and resigned to the ways in which fat people, especially fat women, are treated in America. As a teenager, she’d felt, “Fatness changed her gender somehow, made her into not a girl … maybe into not a human being …” and now, as an adult, she admits, “It is a strange feeling to know that there is no man in this world to whom your body is sacred.” Leah supplies a welcome perspective, and when her chair breaks during a meal at a diner, and she’s subsequently pelted with a hot dog bun by a sneering pre-teen, it’s a genuinely climactic scene.
Admirers of Eisenberg’s nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia—a New York Times Notable Book in 2020—will recognize some of its motifs in Housemates, namely community, outsiders, and rural America. Thanks to Eisenberg’s engaging prose, both established fans and newcomers to her work will appreciate this accomplished and thoughtful follow-up.
Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan lives in New York City, where she is usually reading. Her work has appeared in SELF, The Week, City Limits, and other titles.
