The Turner House
By Angela Flournoy
Literary fiction
April 2015
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0544303164
Home is a powerful symbol. At its best, home stands for haven, that safe
place where someone loves you regardless of what has happened, because
you belong there.
That’s the kind of home The Turner House has been for the family of 13
brothers and sisters, raised in a Yarrow Street home in Detroit in
Angela Flournoy’s debut novel. For more than 50 years, through the rise
and fall of working class Detroit, the Turners have known love in that
house and gone on to raise their own families.
Their truck-driving father Francis has died and now their matriarch,
Viola, has had to move in with the oldest son and his wife after
suffering strokes. The Turner house is now one of those abandoned houses
on Detroit’s east side. The debt on it is far more than what anyone
will pay for it after the era of predatory loans hit the Turners, like
many of their neighbors.
Being it’s a large family, not all the siblings are in the same
situation or the same mindset. Some think of ways they could scrounge up
enough money to pay what the bank wants to short-sell the house for.
Others scheme to see if someone they know will pay the bank so they can
have the house.
The youngest, Lelah, has just been evicted from her apartment. She has a
serious gambling addiction and was fired after borrowing from fellow
employees and complaining when she was sexually harassed. Babysitting
her grandson is a way to stay out of the casino and a place to be
daytime, but it’s not 24 hours and she’s not on the best of terms with
her daughter. She has no other place to go except home, sneaking into
the old home at night.
Being able to go home meant a lot to her when her marriage fell apart and she took her baby to her parents’ house:
Even before moving home for good, she’d seen that staying in the
Midwest had its rewards, the most significant being that Brianne
received Francis Turner’s blessing. A blessing from Francis did not have
a spiritual connotation in any formal sense. It meant that Francis
would get to know your child in a way that wasn’t possible for everyone
in his ever-expanding line. In the final years of his life, Francis
spent most days on the back porch, eyeing his tomato patch with
good-natured suspicion, listening to his teams lose on the radio, and
smoking his pipe. He did these things, and he held Brianne. Right
against his chest. Francis had nothing cute or remotely entertaining to
offer babies, he didn’t say anything to them at all. Instead he gave
them his heartbeat. Put their little heads on his chest and went about
his day. Even the fussiest babies seemed to know better than to cut
short their time with Francis via undue crying or excessive pooping.
Lelah would stand in the back doorway and watch Brianne sleeping against
Francis, his large hand holding her up by the butt, and think she could
stand a few more years of being close by. How many babies had he held
just like that since Cha-Cha was born, using only his heartbeat as
conversation?
There is a moment at the end of the book that underlays Lelah’s memory.
It’s one of those heart-warming moments that isn’t forced, but which
means more because it’s true.
The oldest, Cha-Cha, has always felt responsible and really knows how to
fuss with finesse. Saving the family home is so important to him. So is
taking care of his mother. And depending on his wife to make the huge
family gatherings go off without a hitch. A truck driver delivering
loads of new cars, Cha-Cha ran his truck off the road one night. It
wasn’t fatigue. He saw the haint that he hadn’t seen since he was a
child. And now he’s got to go to a company psychiatrist to talk about
it.
As the oldest and youngest deal with their problems, they reach out to
family and family won’t leave them alone. This is one of the strengths
of Flournoy’s novel. Although the largest family I know has only six
siblings, the dynamics are the same as depicted here. The love and
logistics are palpable. Flournoy handles a huge cast -- and yes, jumps
back and forth in time -- and never once is the reader confused about
who, what or when.
Siblings appear to be on the verge of making the worst mistakes they
could. None of them, however, go through what Francis did when he came
up to Detroit after his military service looking for work, leaving Viola
and his oldest back home in the South. Some of what happens to Francis
is due to the times, but he is the true patriarch of the family when he
exhibits pride that controls how he makes his decisions. It’s something
that many of his children struggle with as well. But Flournoy shows not
only that pride masquerading as self-righteousness can get a person in
trouble, pride also can be a source of strength to make it through hard
times and persevere.
Just as Flournoy is able to work with so many characters, she also is
able to convey what matters about so many elements -- post-war Detroit
job hunting, today’s unemployment lines, casinos, pawnshops, haints,
family, siblings, children, past debts, making payments that aren’t just
money, making retribution, making do, doing better, dreams, schemes,
addition, healing, honesty in confrontations about old and new hurts,
forgiveness and fresh starts.
Everything revolves around each other and their house:
Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to
brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On
frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to
room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards
creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes
worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up
there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints,
find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if
need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses,
take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re
gone.
Thanks to Angela Flournoy, the fictional Turners have a legacy of a home
that is far more than a house. It is also a haven for a reader. No
wonder this novel is a National Book Award finalist.
©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
