Guest House

Guest House. The title says it all. Every character in the story is a guest in Melba's house - directly or indirectly. The boxy old farmhouse with the twelve-pane door is the central character, silently observing the ebb and flow of life around it. Rarely have I read a book where I can, in some way, relate to all of the characters. We all know, have been or are one of the people of "Guest House". Ms. Richardson weaves a tale with rich characters, engaging story lines and elegant writing punctuated with prose that is a bit like getting hit in the face with a cold fish. In a good way. It makes the book hard to resist. We can all hope she will tempt us with more. Finally, the cover photo is perfect. It's Matt's tree. It's Melba's House. It's Guest House.

Barbara Richardson's "Guest House" proves to be a brilliant work of fiction. Like other great books, it starts slowly, quietly adding layer upon layer of character and action until the whole thing gets rolling and thunders on to a dramatic and surprising conclusion. This book reminds me of Keri Hulme's extraordinary "Bone People," which won of the world's great literary prizes, the Booker, some twenty-five years ago. But Richardson's prose is more graceful than Hulme's, and her characters seem even more alive. I picked up "Guest House" expecting to read it slowly, a few pages here, a few pages there, over the course of a week or two. That's how I started. Yet soon I was caught up the juggernaut of events and character evolution, and I read and read and read until it was the middle of the night and the book was done. Bravo! Bravo! This story and its characters will stick with me a long, long time.

I have just finished GUEST HOUSE and I loved it. I rarely want to sit down and read a book all over again but that is just what I'm doing with this one. Barbara Richardson's novel has the richness of style of a Michael Chabon, the poetic prose of Janet Fitch, the sparse opulence of Annie Proulx, and the humor of Fannie Flag, yet it is her own original voice. I admit that when I first started reading I thought there were too many Point-of-view characters, and not enough of Melba Burns as a clear-cut protagonist but as I read on and got into the rhythm of it I found myself liking the different points of view. I loved the fast-paced, wham-bam hurling language and the toughness of it all. The characters were brave and angry in a world that offered them little. This is a novel deserving of awards and a great book to discuss in a book club. I can't wait to read more from this new and talented writer.

Not long ago I obtained a pre-publication copy of Guest House. I made the wonderful mistake of reading it late one night as I stood in the kitchen, scotch in hand, waiting for the noise of the day's events to be overwhelmed by the desire for sleep. An hour later I was still standing, marking in the margins those places that astonished me. The characters in Guest House come to life as they careen through the hit-and-run chaos of a wildly dysfunctional family. Richardson, who has an eye for the quirky grace that shows up in the unlikeliest of places, brings such a generous and unflinching gaze to her world that I felt not just invited, but compelled to follow. In the end, her generosity rubs off; I cared deeply about her characters, and not just the innocent ones. Guest House is a banquet: tragic and funny, wry and sexy, dark and triumphant. Like the main character, Melba, who wants "to sink into the bones of things," I found myself looking at my own world in a different way, newly reminded that love is found in the glorious imperfection of things.

One afternoon, Melba Burns -- a thick-ankled, 53-year-old realtor in Portland, Oregon who is the utterly likeable heroine of GUEST HOUSE -- witnesses the accidental death of a bicyclist. She takes this event as a "teleflorist delivery from God," writes novelist Barbara K. Richardson, who adds, "She would make his death count. However lonely and odd her stance, she held her ground like an old Doug Fir whose whole forest had been felled for subdivisions but just you wait -- a flood was coming and only the mud-pocked tree would stand." And Richardson writes beautifully about how Melba does indeed make the young man's death count. She stops driving, quits her lucrative job, and after grounding her great and recognizable kindness in an old farm house she has bought in the worst neighborhood in town, takes in one member after another of a family which has been blown to smithereens by alcohol and impetuousness. Novelist Richardson, who is part comedienne, part landscape artist and part Zen master, reveals the vulnerability of her characters with utmost delicacy. All of the adults have done great harm to themselves, and those of them who are parents have hurt children, too. Not everyone survives. But there is salvation here, and it happens in this addictively-readable and often hilarious novel the way it happens in life -- imperfectly, without applause, but with sudden rushes of rightness and heart.