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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Welcome to Rivers Solomon's dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel.
The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things―the strange and the unexplainable―began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.
As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family's past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a "natural" death for their parents ... but was it supernatural?
Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.
ONE.
Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her.
Maybe my mother is God, and that's why even though she's never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.
I'm Chava in the garden, freshly aware of my nakedness. Can't let Mother see what lowly thing I've become.
* * *
One day soon, I'll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.
Tonight, she can't sleep. She wants me to strap her fourteen-year-old body to my chest with a sling, the way I did when she was a baby. Her need is heavy, like a secret.
"Yoyo?" she calls quietly. "You awake?"
I conjure up a fake snore, but when she turns to leave, I flick on the bedside lamp. At least Mama owned up to her cruelty, would say it straight: I don't want nothing to do with you right now.
"What's up?" I ask Elijah, and she shrugs. "Want some company?" She shrugs again, her hands obscured in the sleeves of her too-big sweatshirt.
My ability to dredge up love from the paltry reserves is one that comes and goes. Let tonight be enough to undo all my sins.
I give Elijah a scalp massage. I warm her up a mug of oat milk steeped with lavender. I run her a bath. I make her a snack. I make her another snack when she doesn't eat the first one because it's too wet, which means I put too much sugar-free blueberry jam on it. If I'd put on less, she might have accused it of being too dry, and once it's too dry, it's impossible to add more jam later, because "that's just wrong." In the end, I make her a bowl of ramen with crispy chopped mushrooms and kimchi.
A mother from shul says I do too much for Elijah, that if I keep coddling her she'll never learn to stand on her own. My mother made me pack my own lunch from the age of four—and any time I woke in the night to ask her for a cup of water, she'd say, Ezri, you know where the tap is. Teddy bear in tow, I'd army-crawl to the kitchen, low to the ground so the ghost wouldn't find me. She always did.
Despite all the coddling denied me as a child, I never became the independent island of my mother's dreams. I'm a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth.
If I make Elijah too many snacks, it's because food-making is effortless compared to the real task of child-rearing: emotional presence. I don't give my daughter too much because I have nothing to give.
I'm not even her parent, some days. Too many times Elijah has squeezed my shoulder, shaken me, and said, Yoyo, I need some money to get food from the shops. I ignore her, no longer her yoyo in those moments, but instead a vessel of ghosts.
Used to my dissociative episodes, Elijah knows when to reach into my wallet and get my debit card herself.
After midnight, when Elijah still can't sleep, I watch TV with her in her bed. True crime. Something grisly about a dead teenager or several. We both find solace in the inevitability of broken girls. Something to count on.
My youngest sister, Emmanuelle, asks how my daughter and I can stomach such ugliness. I tell her we watch the sensationalized breakdowns of people's lives in the same spirit we do puzzles. By the end, we hope to piece it all together. We cling to the promise inherent in the genre's title, that we will find something true here.
Not that any of these series ever deliver. This isn't because they lack in true things to say but because we already know the true things they have to say. What we are actually hoping for is a different truth, a different answer to the question: Why did he do it? How did the wife not know? Why did the mother allow this? Why weren't they watching more closely? How, in such a crowded café, did no one see, did no one stop this untethering of blood from body?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is that human beings are not very good. I say this not misanthropically but with the realization that we, through apparent dominance over other animals, have crowned ourselves kings, when in reality we are ill equipped to handle the basic demands of life on ...
Excerpted from Model Home by Rivers Solomon. Copyright © 2024 by Rivers Solomon. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home opens with a chilling and mesmerizing line: "Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her." The book is narrated by Ezri Maxwell, who grew up Black and nonbinary in a white gated community, and who wonders, upon reentering the area as an adult, what the point is of having a guard regulating entry: "To keep the bad people out? Every guard will fail at that because the bad people are already inside. This is their fort."
In this scene, Ezri, who left for an Oxford education when they were sixteen, has returned from the UK to the Dallas suburbs and to their sisters Eve and Emmanuelle, with their teenage daughter Elijah in tow. After entering their childhood home, they find their parents dead in the backyard — police are soon declaring it a murder-suicide. Ezri and their sisters experienced many eerie occurrences in the house in their youth for which there seems to be no readily available explanation: Emmanuelle was burned by sulfuric acid that somehow got into her bathwater, animals mysteriously died, a boy who agreed to stay in the house alone once on a dare disappeared and was never seen again. The reader has limited perspective into what Eve and Emmanuelle (and even Ezri, whose first-person narration features incomplete and confusing memories) really think about these happenings, but now, reunited years later and in mourning, the siblings are forced to reckon with what power the house has and what role it may have played in their parents' deaths.
Ezri still feels resentful towards their parents, and particularly their mother, who they perceived as stubborn, proud, and elistist for having insisted on remaining in a neighborhood harmful to them in more ways than one. The first line of the novel ignites an ongoing, pulsing poetic meditation that repeats the incantation-like phrase "Mother is God." Reflections on Ezri's actual mother are countered and muddled by their memories of (and seeming interactions with) someone referred to as Nightmare Mother and the "woman without a face." As Ezri and their siblings seek to resolve the mystery of their parents' death and the reader explores the unfolding chaos of Ezri's thoughts, Ezri's childhood experiences begin to cohere with current reality. Meanwhile, a subplot forms around Elijah's secret relationship with a woman named Lily, whom the reader can identify as a predator but of whose presence and influence Ezri is wholly unaware, preoccupied as they are by thoughts of the house and their parents' funeral.
Model Home is openly a horror story built on social and political realities, in which the lurking evil is understood to be racism and the horrors it enables. This is not the revelation or even the lesson of the novel, but a given, and the riches of the plot that ensues — terrifying but also entertaining, sweet, and sometimes hilarious in a way that can scarcely be described (in one flashback, when Ezri's mother thinks they aren't being enthusiastic enough about a night out, they proclaim, "I want to go more than I've ever wanted to go anywhere in my entire life! I have dreamed about going to a restaurant on a Wednesday night since I was a wee child. A wee sick Victorian child!") — are for those who accept this premise without needing to be convinced. It is a book generously and unapologetically for the victims, without interest in laboring over the complexity of racists and abusers, but rather in tending the nuanced perspectives of those forced to deal with the blunt damage done to them, those already keenly aware of the layers of humanity employed by others as a device to gain and take advantage of their trust.
In fact, the novel interrogates the concept of "humanity" as a perceived moral good, asking whether it might be more accurate to see it as a notion associated with sensitivity, intelligence, multifacetedness, and greater understanding that is used to obscure violence and maintain racial hierarchy. In another flashback, the siblings' mother, an academic who gave up her career for her children, refers to "the white colonialist assumption that humankind is separate from and above the rest of animal kind, justifying human dominion over it. How powerful it would be for us to be called animals and say, Yes, yes, of course. And what does that make you? Not animal? Not flesh? Not alive?"
Solomon's novel retains a mood of classic horror, of shadows lurking in dark corners, but in structure, it ends up feeling more like a thriller with horror elements than the reverse. It has a genuine mystery. Readers need not fear an ambiguous ending. Some may find the neat lining up of plot incidents a bit hard to swallow, but the story, while it eventually reveals the strings being pulled behind the curtain, is content to create its own reality, which feels deliberately constructed at every turn. It is, finally, a tale of the recovery and reinvention of a family broken from its traditional base, of sibling bonds and love that has persisted even without being named or understood.
Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook
Sarah Gailey, author of Just Like Home and Magic for Liars
Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women and The Changeling
In Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home, main character Ezri Maxwell reflects on Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun — about a Black family living in Chicago after World War II, the Youngers, who make plans to move to an all-white neighborhood. Ezri's Aunt Jacqueline compares the situation of the Youngers to Ezri's immediate family, Black people who lived in a white gated community in the Dallas suburbs during much of Ezri's youth.
The title A Raisin in the Sun references Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem": "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" The play's characters include brother and sister Walter and Beneatha, their mother, and Walter's wife Ruth. Walter and Beneatha's father has died, leaving the family life insurance money, some of which their mother has chosen to use for a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, though Walter wants to use it to open a liquor store. The questions of what will happen with the remainder of the money and whether the family will go ahead with the move provide the story's tension. Eventually, they are visited by a white man who tries to dissuade them from moving, indirectly threatens them, and offers to buy them out.
A Raisin in the Sun, inspired by Hansberry's own experiences, was the first Broadway play written by a Black woman, as well as the first to have a Black director (Lloyd Richards). James Baldwin later wrote of the work, "Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage."
Aunt Jacqueline uses A Raisin in the Sun to make a point about Ezri's mother's pride and determination, while also suggesting that a person may have good reasons to choose differently from the Maxwells and the Youngers: "[Y]ou could say a wise family would've listened, wouldn't have gone ahead to live with folks who clearly didn't want them there. But no, we see the act as brave. Or we're supposed to. That's your mama. She wasn't going to be run out her home."
Ezri thinks about how there was a scene in the original play that never made it into the Broadway performance or film version: "The part where one of the neighbors in their Chicago building couldn't fathom why the family wanted to move to a neighborhood of white people, because their house would probably get bombed."
The neighbor Ezri refers to is Mrs. Johnson, who appears in Act II, Scene II. Mrs. Johnson makes nosy, insinuating comments and clearly enjoys the opportunity to bring others down a notch, as when she dramatically conjures an imagined future newspaper headline about the Youngers' house being bombed, and then follows up with, "[Y]ou know I'm praying to God every day that don't nothing like that happen! But you have to think of life like it is." She proceeds to criticize Beneatha for her proud attitude, blaming it on her college education, and to remark that there is nothing wrong with Walter being a chauffeur, which ignites his mother's feelings about how her son deserves better than to be "any kind of servant."
The scene with Mrs. Johnson, obnoxious as she may be, complicates and adds weight to the family's resistance against racist expectations, clarifying the real dangers they face as well as their limited choices. Solomon's reference to this scene in Model Home highlights the resentment Ezri feels towards their parents for how their class aspirations intersected with the harm their children experienced, though this idea undergoes its own complications as the plot unfolds. It also emphasizes how inequality doesn't only manifest as a simple lack of money or opportunity. Like the Youngers, Ezri's parents chose to move where they did because it was economically sensible — a house in white suburbia cost the same as a small apartment in Brooklyn. Both families, because they were Black, could not just take the best deal without a second thought, but had to consider all the risks and implications of their decision.
Random House first edition cover of A Raisin in the Sun, courtesy of Between the Covers
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