THE TURNER HOUSE

A complicated portrait of the modern American family emerges in Flournoy's debut novel.

For the 13 Turner siblings, the house on Detroit’s East Side isn’t just their childhood home. It’s also the crux of memories of their dead father and a link among 13 very different adults. But the house has built up debt, their ill mother, Viola, lives elsewhere, and a question hangs—what to do with the Yarrow Street house? As the children debate, the narrative divides into the perspectives of Lelah, Troy and Charlie “Cha Cha” Turner, interspersed with their father’s flashbacks of surviving in gritty Detroit 60 years earlier. Cha-Cha, the oldest at 64, drives trucks for Chrysler and is recovering from an accident after a vision of a luminous ghost, which he’d last seen 40 years earlier at Yarrow, caused him to veer off the road. Meanwhile, Lelah has been evicted from her apartment due to a gambling addiction and takes up residence in the now-abandoned house. And Troy, a disillusioned policeman, wants to illegally short sell the house to his sometime girlfriend. As the story progresses, the siblings’ dilemmas become increasingly knotty. Lelah’s roulette addiction, evocatively described—“the chips looked like candy. Pastel, melt-away things that didn’t make sense to save”—worsens; Cha-Cha is visited by the ghost, dredging up ugly childhood memories; and Troy tries to con Viola into selling the house. Flournoy ramps up the suspense until, one night, the three are all drawn to Yarrow Street, leading to a fight with intractable results. Flournoy’s strength lies in her meticulous examination of each character’s inner life. Lelah, who uses gambling as a balm for her fractured relationship with her daughter, is an especially sympathetic character—she seeks “proof that she could be cherished by someone, if only for a while.” Flournoy’s writing is precise and sharp, and despite several loose ends—Troy doesn’t experience significant emotional change by the book’s end, and the house’s fate remains unclear—the novel draws readers to the Turner family almost magnetically.

A talent to watch.