A Good House

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Bonnie Burnard is the author of two award-winning short-story
collections. A Good House, her first novel, won the Giller Prize. It
starts off in the early postwar era as the men are coming back, some
seriously wounded. Bill Chambers, luckier than many, has lost several
fingers from his right hand. He returns to his job at the small-town
hardware store, and to his wife Sylvia and their three children.

The novel opens with a description of the town of Stonebrook Creek:
almost idyllic, with just a hint of menace: “In the winter months, at
Turnbull’s barn, kids who had bundled themselves in bulky,
wet-smelling wool rested their lit flashlights in the crotches of the
willows that lined the frozen creek to shovel the snow up onto the
sloping banks....” One can visualize a Kurelek painting, and a
thousand prewar Canadian towns.

A Good House, however, is not an idyll. It follows the fortunes of
three generations of a middle-class family through weddings and
funerals, births and holidays, and, of course, crises. The family faces
divorce, illness, and various other troubles. Bill’s second wife,
Margaret, becomes a tower of strength for the entire family.

Burnard’s take on human experience is sensitive and lucid, while her
prose is clean yet detailed, sometimes lyrical. Like all fiction, A Good
House probes life’s pain, joys, complications. Burnard’s portrait,
however, is deeper and more skilful than most.