Title: The Turner House Author: Angela Flournoy
Published: April 14, 2015
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 341
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The Turners live on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house sees thirteen children get grown and gone—and some return; it sees the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. Despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs, the house still stands. But now, as their powerful mother falls ill and loses her independence, the Turners might lose their family home. Beset by time and a national crisis, the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called back to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts might haunt—and shape—their family's future.
A major contribution to the literature on American families, The Turner House brings us a colorful brood full of love, pride, and unlikely inheritances. It's a striking examination of the American dream and a celebration of the ways in which our families bring us home.
Angela Flournoy’s debut, a multigenerational saga set in Detroit, is a solid, if slightly mundane, literary novel. The Turner House does very well in detailing the daily complexities and dramas that arise between the 13 Turner siblings, which are focused mainly on the fate of the family home. The larger portion of the text takes place over a brief period of only a few weeks, though it’s supplemented by flashbacks and memories. For the most part, this is a quiet, unhurried novel, and at the end I did have to wonder what, exactly, had happened over the course of 300 pages. Thinking back, it seems like not much, though I think there’s something to be said for the everdayness of Flournoy’s story. The Turner House is a book that could have been better, but still succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is to explore a family and its history.
This history is told, primarily, from two perspectives: Cha-Cha and Lelah’s, who are the oldest and youngest Turner children, respectively. Separated by 24 years, each has a different perspective on the family and its situation, and Flournoy did well to balance the story between the two characters as she did. On top of family issues, Cha-Cha and Lelah both have personal issues of their own. Cha-Cha may or may not be seeing ghosts, and Lelah is a homeless gambler. Those two threads weave throughout The Turner House, and in the end are interwoven within the larger family narrative.
What I like most about this book is its realness. With so many children (not to mention grandchildren and in-laws), the Turner family is hard to keep track of and extremely complicated. Yet the author makes this impossibly large family feel very authentic, and she handles each character well, though obviously only a few of the siblings are developed much more than a cursory description. I very much believed in the dynamic between the siblings, their mother, and the outside world, and I like how they were always united, in spite of serious and not-so-serious conflicts that arose.
In spite of this, I felt that nothing was really happening, especially at first. And I realize that The Turner House is not the kind of book that attempts to create a complex, involved plot, but sometimes Flournoy’s deliver of characters and relationships seemed too dry and mundane. Over time, I did grow invested in the story—in a way—but it was hard, at first, to push through the Turner family’s crises. However, the ending, which was open-ended, I found to be very satisfying, and I thought it fit perfectly with the tone and course of the novel. It’s not much of a resolution regarding certain issues (i.e. what’s going to happen to the house?), but in terms of all the various character arcs, Flournoy wrapped things up nicely.
Probably, I would have enjoyed this more had it been more engaging, though engagement is a hard quality to define and critique. As it stands, The Turner House is a strong first novel, one that offers a lot in terms of character and voice. Perhaps this isn’t the best story, but the people who populate its pages are well drawn and interesting enough to make up for that.
