The Household Spirit: A Novel, by Tod Wodicka
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The Household Spirit: A Novel, by Tod Wodicka
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In this remarkable novel, Tod Wodicka, author of All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, has crafted a luminous story of a most curious friendship. There’s something wrong next door. At least that’s what neighbors Howie Jeffries and Emily Phane both think. Since his daughter and wife moved out, Howie has been alone, an accidental recluse content with his fishing and his dreams of someday sailing away from himself on a boat. Emily couldn’t be more different: she’s irreverent, outgoing, and seemingly well adjusted. But when she returns from college to care for her dying grandfather, Howie can’t help but notice her increasingly erratic behavior—not to mention her newfound love of nocturnal gardening. The thing is, although they’ve lived side by side in the only two houses on Route 29 in rural upstate New York since Emily was born, Howie and Emily have never so much as spoken to each other. Both have their reasons: Howie is debilitatingly shy, and Emily has been hiding the fact that she suffers from a nighttime affliction that makes her terrified to go to sleep and makes her question the very reality of her waking life. It is only when tragedy strikes that their worlds finally intersect in ways neither of them could have ever imagined. A poignant, big-hearted, and often humorous novel about two unique individuals unceremoniously thrown together, The Household Spirit is a story about how little we know the people we see every day—and the unexpected capabilities of the human heart.
The Household Spirit: A Novel, by Tod Wodicka- Amazon Sales Rank: #1113253 in Books
- Brand: Wodicka, Tod
- Published on: 2015-06-09
- Released on: 2015-06-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.40" h x 1.24" w x 6.41" l, 1.39 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Review "Wry and touching. . . . Perfectly formed. . . . The author ensures that we are affected by [his characters’] separate plights and cheered by their shared camaraderie. Wodicka keeps the proceedings light." —Minneapolis Star Tribune"Wodicka’s troubled characters are sympathetic, and his sentences are funny and surprising." —The New Yorker "Presented through Wodicka’s irreverently funny writing, the relationship between [his] two oddball characters is amusing and touching. . . . The Household Spirit is a heartwarming story of loneliness and connection." —Financial Times "An affecting portrait of lonely misfits." —The New York Times Book Review "Wodicka is known to be LOL funny. But when he does sad, it’s the best fiction around by miles, full of tender ache and tenderer beauty." —Artforum "An achingly beautiful and unexpectedly hilarious portrait of two deeply sad, deeply sensitive people reaching the breaking point and pulling each other back." —BookPage"Deeply, refreshingly uncool. [The Household Spirit] is both quiet and sneakily psychedelic: swirling around and burrowing inside the lives of its two characters, the reclusive 50-year-old Howie Jeffries and his irreverent, messed-up 25-year-old neighbour Emily Phane. Both are stuck. Emily suffers from extreme attacks of sleep paralysis; Howie has been more or less haunting his own house since his wife and daughter left him 20 years ago. Their stories reflect and refract each other, eventually coming together in a strange and unexpected way." —Tank Magazine "Finely nuanced details and multi-layered dark comedy are Wodicka's strong suits. Howie's and Emily's alternating viewpoints reveal their vulnerabilities and enrich their well-drawn characterizations. Route 29 may be an insignificant thoroughfare in fictional Queens Falls, but Wodicka elevates its prominence, navigating a poignant, revelatory story on the road to the liberating nature of truth and friendship." —Shelf Awareness "Beautiful. . . . Wodicka amplifies the eccentricities of [his] characters with a style that is a gentle stream of consciousness. . . . Sentences shift, ebb and flow, evoking the confusion and sadness within." —The Gilmore Guide to Books"For all the book’s oddball charm and darkly comic suburban realism, at its foundations lies a tale of a middle-aged man acquiring a surrogate daughter who is the mirror image of his own estranged offspring, and a solitary young woman belatedly blessed with a fatherly protector. Yet Wodicka gives the story a genuinely characterful allure, humorously and poignantly revealing the depth of compassion and understanding in Howie’s paternalistic relationship with the disturbed Emily, and painting a tender and intimate portrait of their inner lives that affectingly burrows under the skin. . . . A fable about the mutual comfort of strangers . . . its generosity of spirit is undeniable." —The Sunday Times (UK) "Comic, poignant and wholly convincing. . . . Have you ever read a novel which ended on the exclamation ‘Daddy!’ and still managed to be both unsentimental and strangely moving? Tod Wodicka’s use of the word has the feelgood factor of The Railway Children and the bitter wit of Sylvia Plath. . . . [The Household Spirit] come[s] full circle, attaining perfect integration between start and finish—it connects." —The Independent (UK) "The Household Spirit is singular among novels about depressed people in that it is neither boring nor depressing." —Esquire, "Summer Reading List""The Household Spirit is a powerful and quietly compelling novel. Tod Wodicka reveals his characters unflinchingly, in all their strangeness, and never loses sight of their frailties and loves. . . . Unique and surprising, The Household Spirit is beautifully told." —Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast"Touching. . . . Two identical houses sit on an isolated stretch of Route 29 in Queens Falls, N.Y. In one house lives Howard Jefferies—a divorced, 50-year-old worker at a water-treatment plant who leads a solitary life. He thinks often of fishing, his now-defunct family unit, and his mysterious next-door neighbor. Emily Phane, the same age as his daughter, lives next to Howard and tends to her elderly grandfather. Although they have not spoken, their mutual watching of and interest in each other provides a strange comfort—for Howard, her presence stirs a protective paternal instinct that has been dormant since the departure of his daughter, and for Emily, watching Howard distracts from debilitating sleep troubles, a complicated love life, and her grandfather’s mortality. When Emily’s desperation comes to a breaking point, her cry for help elicits a response from her shy and awkward neighbor. From there, an unlikely and close friendship develops that changes the direction of both their lives. . . . The accounts of sleep paralysis, grief, and personal demons make for a novel well worth reading." —Publishers Weekly"[A] bittersweet, deeply sympathetic sophomore effort. . . . On a rural stretch of Route 29 north of Albany, Howie lives alone, 20 years divorced and just turned 50. He’s estranged from his daughter, who’s 24, the same age as Emily, the woman he watches behaving oddly outside the house next door as the novel opens. He watched years earlier when Emily’s young mom came home pregnant, delivered, and soon after died with her own mother in a car crash, leaving the infant with her grandfather, Peppy. He watched when Emily nursed Peppy until he passed away. Then Howie saves her from a fire in her house and she moves in with him. Wodicka slowly, separately creates each of these two strong characters as he draws them together through smooth shifts in time and place. Howie’s face has a ‘gaunt, arboreal lonesomeness’ that goes well with his near-Asperger lack of affect. Emily, who is interested in the neurobiology of flora, transplants him from isolation to a society of two and beyond. Howie thinks it may be skill at fishing that helps him recognize and gently pull her out of the horrific night terrors that have plagued her sleep. . . . Wodicka’s fluid, expressive prose—dotted with quotable observations often as odd as his players—serves well his weaving of such a convincing, unexpected story from eccentricity, pain, and need. . . . Strange and rich and precisely pitched." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)"When I read Tod Wodicka's novel, it was as if somewhere in its core there was a light that glowed out onto me. It was an extraordinary experience. An extraordinary book." —Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture "An intimate study of two oddball characters, The Household Spirit is also a profound meditation upon existence, the demons that haunt our subconscious, and the fragile solace to be found in human relationships. Wodicka writes with a winningly idiosyncratic combination of brio and tenderness, and concludes his story sublimely. The Household Spirit is a book to hold dear." —Clare Wigfall, author of The Loudest Sound and Nothing"The Household Spirit is very special. There's a pleasing familiarity to it but it's also fresh, funny and unpredictable." —Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha"Rarely have I been so captivated by a novel—its compassion, wisdom, warmth. I loved it." —Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall (Winner of the Costa Book of the Year and the Betty Trask Prize)
About the Author TOD WODICKA was born in Glens Falls, New York. He is the author of All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well. He lives in Berlin.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Part One The Creep Ever since Howie Jeffries could remember, people had been asking him if anything was wrong. It was his face, mostly. The last face on earth. First, as a small boy, he assumed that something must be wrong and this frightened him. Later, realizing that maybe he himself was wrong, Howie would say that he guessed he was just having a bad day. Weeks, months, then years of bad days. Finally, he gave up and when called to account for his woeful demeanor, merely shrugged. “Cheer up,” people told him, “it’ll never happen.” But Howie’s face was always happening. Even now, at fifty. There, he thought, staring into the bathroom mirror. Still happening. He washed his hands. The last face on earth was how his ex-wife had once described the gaunt, arboreal lonesomeness of his features. “I love it to bits,” she assured him. Probably he was supposed to be alone. Howie dried his hands. This was still his family’s house in the same way a story still belongs to its characters even if most of them are dead by the end. Howie Jeffries’s wife and his daughter were not dead, they just lived elsewhere and with other people. Sometimes, when falling asleep, he still heard the clattering, indigestive sounds the kitchen made when his wife cooked. Or, getting dressed, he’d recall how his wife rolled his socks into tight, tiny animals. Open the sock drawer and there they were, waiting. Howie once had a drawer devoted entirely to socks. He’d remember their wall calendar, how they’d present themselves before it, peer into it together, his wife writing in her red and green and black markers, commanding Howie to watch—participate—as she explained the future. Generally speaking, the future was Howie’s fault. She left him for a man who knew how to talk about her feelings and who, moreover, was named Timmy, not Tim or Timothy. Timmy had introduced notions like potential. Timmy wasn’t content to sit and grow old and potentially die of freaking boredom night after night, now was he? Timmy was knowledgeable about things that happened in other languages. He was a painter of houses, landscapes. He was eight years younger than Howie and his wife. The divorce was a swift, anesthetized procedure. Three lawyers, his and hers. His wife had a new signature to go along with her new dress, her bright, naked fingers. Signing here and here and, right, good, and just there too, please. OK. Howie writing his name slowly, meticulously, as if there might yet be a reprieve, an on second thought, going so far as to include his neglected middle name for those three extra marital seconds. Victor. His great-grandfather’s name, his uncle’s too, stalling there between the Howard and the Jeffries. VICTOR. Howie had been thirty, his daughter, nearly five. Twenty years later and none of them had died, not of freaking boredom or otherwise. They were all OK now. Howie and his daughter, were friends on the internet computer. He loved Harriet but was unsure as to whether he knew her, and he wondered if this made a difference. But good for her, he often thought, unable to attach any weight to the locution as he slid down through Harri’s Facebook life in New York City. Good for you. Sounding, he knew, not unlike his own father and the bloodless there-you-go’s the old man reserved for the people who had disappointed him most. Because, really, why impose? Why say anything at all? Howie brushed his teeth. Four in the morning and he’d forgotten the toothpaste again. He smiled as if someone were standing behind him, a woman in the mirror, a wife who appreciated this small, endearing hiccup in his hygienic routine. Howie, you goofball. Her arms around his waist. Some years ago at the GE company picnic, Howie had been drinking beer with his co-workers and their spouses, one of whom had been holding a little boy. Ever attuned to such things, Howie had tried to minimize his face. The boy stared. Nothing wrong, Howie wanted to explain. It’s just me. This is what I look like. Then someone had said something funny and Howie, trying not to laugh, couldn’t help smiling. The kid, a toddler, had recoiled as if slapped. Everyone pretended to get a kick out of this, even Howie. Later, the boy’s mother pulled Howie aside. “Kids,” she said. “Howie, sweetie, I’m so embarrassed. I guess your smile just rattled him.” Like this was an obvious thing, something long accepted, past the point of discussion. Howie Jeffries had a rattling smile. Still, small children generally liked him, dogs and elderly women, too. Folks with disabilities. His daughter once said that he had a distinguished face. Try and remember that. But just the fact that Harri had told him this out of the blue, as if in conclusion to some long-running internal debate—yeah, distinguished, actually—well, why even say it? Howie flossed. He was not, he knew, an unhappy man. What had he ever done with these hands that he should be ashamed of? Things needed doing, you do them. You treat folks like you expect to be treated back. Howie had never found a good or bad reason to believe in God and believed only that things were getting too noisy and that most people were insane. He had only just returned from his night shift at the General Electric Waste Water Treatment Plant in Schenectady, New York. He enjoyed the forty-five-minute commute. The road at night was where Howie made the most sense to himself. In fact, had he put more stock in self-determination or the pursuit of happiness, he surely would have been a long-haul truck driver. Instead, he’d been with GE for exactly thirty years, something he knew only because his co-workers had recently started teasing him with the possibility of an anniversary party. “Just when you least expect it,” Steve Dube had said. “Jeffries, you do know we’re going to party the shit out of you this time, right? Thirty years, champ. Shit is for real. This time we mean it.” They didn’t, of course. The guys just really liked threatening Howie with large social events. Each year as his birthday approached, he’d be put on warning. Shit could be lurking behind any door. Threatening to celebrate Howie was their way of celebrating Howie. There were worse things, he supposed, than being misidentified as someone who might be killed by a surprise party. Howie had been working two weeks of day shifts followed by two weeks of night shifts for thirty years. His ex-wife had insisted that this was part of his problem, by which she meant her problem with him. The way he willfully curled his life around a different clock than everyone else. Howie recoiled at the intimacy of his own blood. He’d gotten carried away with the flossing again. Howie spit. Howie turned off the bathroom light but continued to stand at the sink. Darkness emboldened the sound of his breathing, his heart. Would you listen to that. Crickets and a far-off dog. Dogs? Owls. Howie approached the bathroom window. He allowed his eyes time to adjust. The treetops moved as if the air had slowed and thickened into water. Pines, mostly, but some elm. There was no moon. Then there was: hard, white, and rolling from behind a bank of silver clouds. He focused on his neighbor’s house, its weak glow. Beyond this, the dark. And he saw her. She was moving along the edge of the woods like you might pace beside a pool you’re not quite ready to jump into. Then, just when Howie began to think that maybe she wouldn’t tonight, she did. She was gone, into the forest, leaving only the slightest splash of night behind her. That and Howie, his face against the bathroom window.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Heartbreaking, yet hopeful By MommaMia The Household Spirit is an intimate tale. It's a beautiful study into the human heart and mind that will remain with you for quite some time. The provocative and sometimes unnerving thoughts of these damaged souls will enter your world and will leave their mark upon you. At times tender and at times disconcerting, Tod Wodicka paints a picture of sadness, longing and family that will move you. It's a study of fear that immobilizes, and of misconceptions and desire.Howie Jeffries is a bit of a recluse. He's divorced and very lonely. He lives on Route 29 in Queens Falls, NY and spends much of his time watching the increasingly odd behavior of his only neighbor, Emily Phane. They have lived next door to teach other for years, but have never spoken. Each one has felt a connection to the other, but they don't reach out to each other until circumstances bring them together. Both of them have their demons and only when they come together does it seem that healing is possible.. These two social misfits find a friendship that is capable of changing them both. I think it both shocks and surprises each character, and watching them interact and get to know each other makes this one a 5 star read.This is a unique book with well developed main characters and a strong, well laid out story. Heartbreaking, most definitely, yet hopeful, and well worth the read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. A Complex Relationship Examined. By LAURI CRUMLEY COATES Complex and heartfelt are words I would use to describe this book. Two identical homes, set on an isolated stretch of Route 29 in Queen Falls, NY. sit next to each other. Howard Jefferies is a solitary man, a 50 year old divorced sanitation worker living alone in his family's previous home.Next door, Emily Phane, the age of Jefferies daughter, lives and cares for her elderly grandfather. Phane and Jefferies don't speak, but they seem to have a comfortable relationship, watching over the other. For Jefferies, it's a paternal type of interest, reminding Howard of his own daughter, long estranged. Emily takes care of her grandfather, suffers sleep problems, and deals with a complex and complicated romantic entanglement of her own. She worries about her Peppy, as she calls her grandfather, and his approaching mortality. After Peppy dies, the relationship between Howard and Emily changes when her home is engulfed in flame and he not only saves her, but allows her to move in with him.By turns endearing and tender, confusing and complex, this is the story of relationship between them. It's well written and deep, and kept me entranced throughout. Highly Recommended.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Creative and intelligent By barry As an avid reader one thing that really excites me is when I find a writer who is not just part of a genre but instead a true artist who loves the written word and makes their work a thing of beauty. I l also love an author who has a voice unique to them in their head with rare and different tales that only they could tell. And that is what author Tod Wodicka does for me. He delivers on both. This is a novel about two sad and lonely characters who find a special bond together. But these characters are oddballs in a very special way. We all have characteristics special to us and these possessed by Howie and Emily make them ones the reader will be very curious about and definitely want to discover more about. They shine in their oddness as does the novel. Wodicka is an intelligent literary author and writes here with a wit and humor that brings a whole new layer to this world that Howie and Emily share. I loved this novel and it touched me deeply. In lesser hands this story would have been a no go but in the hands of Tod Wodicka it becomes a must read. It isn't often I am this grateful for the journey an author takes me on.
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