This morning I reluctantly finished Bonnie Burnard's Giller-winning novel, A Good House. This is, by far, the best novel I've read this year. Perhaps one of the best of the last five years.
I feel like I've said goodbye to good friends.
I'm not ashamed to tell you that I had to close the novel and weep at several points -- not out of sadness necessarily, but because the author has such a painstaking facility with language that she is able to reach out from the novel's pages to touch our hearts.
It really is a work of the finest construction.
Burnard undertakes to tell the story of a large extended family from 1945 through to 1999. We visit them every five or seven years and learn what they've been up to. The characters who start the novel young and full of life grow old along the way, and new members of the family are born and grow up to take their place.
This is life, after all.
That Burnard manages to make us care about each of the characters -- and there are literally dozens of them -- is testament to her genius. It's probably the best use of author omniscient that I've encountered.
It's as moving and haunting as Our Town. Carol Shields calls it, "Perhaps the finest work of fiction produced in this country in some time." She's right.
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