Housemates

March 4, 2024
Two queer artists explore pastoral Pennsylvania in the sumptuous if rambling latest from Eisenberg (The Third Rainbow Girl). Things kick off when Bernie Abbott, a barista and photographer, moves into a house in Philadelphia with four roommates including Leah McCausland, a media studies PhD candidate who is nonbinary. She befriends Leah and is turned on by the sounds of her sexual escapades through a shared wall. When Bernie learns her old professor, the late photographer Daniel Dunn, has bequeathed her his old cameras, plates, and negatives, she wants to reject the offer—Dunn was accused of sexual assault—but Leah changes her mind: “He’s dead.... The slate is wiped blank.” Then Leah receives a grant from her program and enlists Bernie’s collaboration on a vaguely sketched project (“I just want to drive around and look at things and I’d write things down and you’d photograph them”). Bernie’s mission to pick up Dunn’s belongings at his home in rural Mifflin County gives the pair a destination. En route, they encounter rebellious cigarette-smoking Amish teens outside a country buffet and smarmy men lurking around their motel, and their partnership becomes not just creative but romantic. The story starts at a crawl, but once Eisenberg revs the engine, she reaches luminous heights. Readers will count themselves lucky to go along for the ride. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
A timely coming-of-age story about art and love from the author of The Third Rainbow Girl (2020). This novel begins with a middle-aged photographer describing a lengthy bout of depression and isolation with oblique--but very telling--references to how the death of her "housemate" factored into her sense of despair. When she finally reemerges, she encounters "two white kids" in a coffee shop and follows them home. Then this unnamed observer disappears--for a while--as she tells the story of Bernie (who "looked like a thin girl") and Leah (who "looked like a fat boy"). Within a handful of pages, Eisenberg establishes her novel's central themes and the context in which this narrative is taking place. The physical setting is Philadelphia, although Leah and Bernie will embark on a road trip that takes them through central Pennsylvania--a place that is very much itself while also serving as synecdoche for flyover America. The 2016 presidential election and the Covid-19 pandemic offer temporal touchstones. Shifting mores around sexuality and gender, the complicated demands of social justice movements, how we deal with bad people who create good art, and the difference between recording and actually seeing are just some of the topics Eisenberg lays out before setting her Gen Z protagonists loose to explore them. Bernie and Leah meet when Bernie answers an ad that begins "Four Swarthmore grads, looking for a fifth housemate" and ends with "Queer preferred (we all are)." There are also mentions of proactive communication and a chore wheel. In this household, Bernie is an outsider, someone who is not attuned to--and not at all invested in--this kind of intentional living, and Bernie's difference changes Leah. Eisenberg works through the issues she sets before the reader at the beginning of her novel with love and nuance. Or maybe it's better to say that she lets her main characters fumble along in a world in which these issues matter. If that sounds pedantic or prescriptive, it's not. Eisenberg has a poet's eye for truth, and her prose is gorgeously precise and empathetic while remaining cleareyed. Emotionally rich and quietly thought-provoking, this is simply a stunning debut.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.