Story House.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

In a March 2006 interview with Cheri Hanson in Quill & Quire, Timothy Taylor remarked, “I’m not really trying to know enough that I could pretend to be an architect. I’m trying to know enough that I could write the way an architect might speak.” But an avoidance of jargon is just one of this Vancouver writer’s triumphs in Story House.

Four years after Stanley Park, his debut novel, Taylor has lost none of the writing skills that made the early work such a critical and popular success. By exchanging the framework of haute cuisine and the restaurant business for (arguably) the more arcane field of architecture, Taylor stretches his talent for both dialogue and narrative description.

His story revolves around two half-brothers, the sons of Packer Gordon, a deceased and philandering Vancouver architect. Graham, himself an architect, and Elliot, less legitimate than his brother (Packer was, after all, a philanderer) discover an old, abandoned, derelict house on the city’s notorious Downtown Eastside, a house they determine was the first one their father ever built. An L.A. cable television producer figures that the restoration of the building by the Gordon sons would make a wonderful reality show, and the remainder of the meaty story deals with his efforts to enlist the brothers (and their wives) in this endeavour. Elliot (older by a few minutes but hardly the wiser) is involved in the counterfeiting of artifacts—watches, fashion clothing, sunglasses. In Korea he has discovered “Cult Fashion Mall,” where “you could bring any item of clothing or accessory the fashion world (anybody in the world) had ever seen, and they would make a copy for you in seven days.” This motif of fakery is replicated in much of the story.

The novel’s ensuing plot structurally recapitulates its architectural theme, which deals with (among other things) the building and tearing down of marriages, partnerships, friendships—the personal and human structures running parallel to the built edifices. It was interesting to conjecture (and critics did) after Stanley Park how Taylor would improve on his skills as a novelist. Story House can serve as the definitive answer.