(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
If you have ever had an existentially restless moment in your life, and who of course hasn’t (whether we consciously acknowledge it or not), and wondered where it is that you truly belong, you will find with which to deeply identify in Diana Evans’ beautiful novel, A House for Alice.
At the heart of luminously well-written prose are a slew of questions that cut right to the heart of what it means to be connected to other people and how that ebb and flow either makes or breaks us, and how within those relationships, we are often left asking ourselves endless questions about what we want, who we are and how we’re doing.
They are some heavy questions right there, not easily discussed without the weight of a thousand thoughtfully dense philosophical moments upon you, but somehow Evans gives them their worth and due all while telling the story of the eponymous matriarch who, after fifty years in the UK in the yoke of an unhappy marriage and with three fractious daughters all weighing in on the state of her life, wants to go back to Africa, Benin specifically, to finish out her last years.
Into her roughly mid-seventies – Evans observes, with a characteristic poetic description, that her actual birthdate is lost to the past and the village in which she was raised – Alice has struck out on her own in one critical sense – she has left her husband Cornelius who, as the book opens, dies in circumstances that bear some lyrical sense of dark closure.
And meanwhile, what of Alice, the future of Alice? What house would house her when she could no longer live alone, a house on this shore, not a sketchy, far away house? Like Cornelius, she was shrinking in the imagining of the end.
Her world is carefully measured her church and family, with Evans describing her multiple weekly visits to places of Christian worship as the only place where things really make sense for Alice.
Like her daughters, she is adrift, and while you could argue she is anchored by her children and grandchildren, as A House for Alice opens, she is unmoored, largely by the death of Cornelius whose departure from this world, which is also referenced with a fluidity of observance that feels warmly descriptive and yet darkly certain all the same, has left her wondering exactly where she wants to be now she is “tired”.
Everything rests on the building of her new home in Benin, which beset by builders of shaky provenance and quality and issues of disappearing funding, may never be the centre of the world that Alice longs for.
She invests heavily in this imagined future idyll, and while there is a last minute musing on whether home is being there for her family, all scarred by Cornelius’s terrorising of them, in the end you know that A House for Alice will end with the titular character heading back to the only place she really considers home.
And that fuels the central themes of the narrative, all of which centre on where home really is for all of us; it may not take the form of an actual building, although that’s an easily identifiable touchpoint, but we all need a place or person to whom we can return and for whom we are willing to uproot ourselves.
(courtesy official author site)
Two characters for whom this is very real and far from academic are Alice’s youngest daughter Melissa and her ex-husband Michael who parted when Melissa decided he was obscuring her and she couldn’t see her way to where she really belonged.
But with Michael now married to a still aspiring middle-aged singer Nicole, with whom he shares little but the need to have the reassuring qualities each finds in the other, it seems that Melissa, caught between older sisters Adel and Carol, is reassessing exactly where her emotional home lies.
It’s certainly not with the guy she’s currently seeing who’s weirdly moved from “f**k buddy” to “the guy” but without any sense that he means anything at all beyond an occasional touchpoint for her.
Certainly he offers none of the certainty of love and belonging that Michael once did, and might still do, and as A House for Alice unspools its mesmerisingly involving tale of a family of people trying to work out who they are to each other and where the centre of their familial belonging is, we find Melissa, in ways different to her mother but driven by the same need for an emotional anchor, working hard to figure out what it is she wants from a life that feels like its lost its meaning and centre.
They ate, one last supper, while children climbed among the ruins, swinging from the scaffolding, wafting in the emptiness, and the sun was setting in the west. Alice watched it falling down the land, the lone star, never to be extinguished.
Throughout A House for Alice, Evans returns with real empathetic tenderness to rawly intense themes of connection and belonging, laced throughout with the fact that for the family of Alice, sitting astride their Nigerian cultural centre and their very British physical surroundings, there’s the added complication of racism tainting any sense of where it is they truly belong.
In fact, Evans remarks at one point that Alice’s grandson Warren, himself caught in a web of where-to-nexts, finally feels a peace that he has found where he belongs where he goes on a trip to Nigeria and Benin to check on how his grandmother’s house build is progressing and reconnect with family.
Whatever the flavour to their dislocation, Alice and her family, like many people, have a lingering sense of dislocation that is somewhat relieved by the sureties of day-to-day interactions like birthday dinners and catch-ups but which ultimately cannot be assuaged completely by them.
With writing that is a work of art, beautifully arranged words filled with real insight and meaning, A House for Alice is one of those exquisitely good novels that marries style perfectly with substance and truth, every word carrying an illuminating meaning that has you nodding your head in recognition at the need we all have to really know who we are and how we fit into things and what must be done to feel as if we are happy and satisfied with our lives.