A Novel by Susan Kander and Warren Ashworth Paperback: 204 pages Publisher: Blue Cedar Press, Wichita (2021)
This novel challenges any reader who picks it up, and I invite you to do so. Using an unlikely narrative device, authors Warren Ashworth and Susan Kander tell the century-long story of a house through a dialog between the house itself and a portrait hanging on the wall in the dining room. It took me a couple of chapters (they’re short) to get comfortable with this storytelling ploy, but once I was, I raced through the novel.
The house, called Ambleside, actually exists in Newton, Kansas. The portrait subject, Mrs. S. Peale, is fictitious, though the artist who painted her was not. Through a healthy dose of willing suspension of disbelief, we listen to a conversation begun between the house and the woman in the portrait. The house can see the world outside (through its windows) but has only limited awareness of its insides. Mrs. Peale, mistakenly called Mrs. Speale by the generations of family who live there, can only see what is before her, which is almost exclusively the dining room. Yet all of the 20th Century (and parts of the centuries before and after) pass through the house as world events affect the residents and visitors, and the world arrives in many ways in tiny Newton, which grows as well during the novel.
At the beginning of their dialog, Ambleside is almost childlike and asks Mrs. Peale to explain what is happening in the small part of the world outside it can see and about the people who live within it. Mrs. Peale is a bit of a scold, but she brings her understanding of the conversations she overhears and what she had experienced of the world before her death to answer Ambleside’s questions. (Just go with it.) In a way, it is very much a conversation for our age of instantaneous communication with people we will never meet. Yet as the novel progresses, both characters show growth. Both change through their interactions and in their understanding. They are true, round characters in a story.
Like many long friendships, there comes a parting. But there is a happy gift for the reader in the last two pages.
The house, called Ambleside, actually exists in Newton, Kansas. The portrait subject, Mrs. S. Peale, is fictitious, though the artist who painted her was not. Through a healthy dose of willing suspension of disbelief, we listen to a conversation begun between the house and the woman in the portrait. The house can see the world outside (through its windows) but has only limited awareness of its insides. Mrs. Peale, mistakenly called Mrs. Speale by the generations of family who live there, can only see what is before her, which is almost exclusively the dining room. Yet all of the 20th Century (and parts of the centuries before and after) pass through the house as world events affect the residents and visitors, and the world arrives in many ways in tiny Newton, which grows as well during the novel.
At the beginning of their dialog, Ambleside is almost childlike and asks Mrs. Peale to explain what is happening in the small part of the world outside it can see and about the people who live within it. Mrs. Peale is a bit of a scold, but she brings her understanding of the conversations she overhears and what she had experienced of the world before her death to answer Ambleside’s questions. (Just go with it.) In a way, it is very much a conversation for our age of instantaneous communication with people we will never meet. Yet as the novel progresses, both characters show growth. Both change through their interactions and in their understanding. They are true, round characters in a story.
Like many long friendships, there comes a parting. But there is a happy gift for the reader in the last two pages.
Paul Lamb lives and writes in Overland Park, Kansas. As a member of the Kansas Authors Club, he gotten to me many interesting and talented people. His novels, One-Match Fire and Parent Imperfect, are available at Blue Cedar Press.
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