In the first chapter of Rivers Solomon’s fourth book, “Model Home,” the narrator, Ezri, and their teenage daughter, Elijah, give in to insomnia and watch a true-crime show on TV: “We both find solace in the inevitability of broken girls.” Ezri has not always been so fatalistic: “Abuse of power surprises me every time,” they told their own mother at 13; “I guess I hope every time it will be different.” This immediate contrast of past and present introduces an underlying mystery: How did Ezri lose their “earnest heart”?
The action soon begins with a grisly crime that forces Ezri to contend with their past. After living in England for years, they’re summoned back to their childhood home in the Dallas suburbs by a ghost they call “Nightmare Mother” — this ghost sends menacing texts from Ezri’s mother’s phone number — and returns to find their parents dead. The police call it a murder-suicide, but Ezri and their two sisters aren’t convinced, remembering the hostility they faced as the only Black family in their gated community growing up.
Chapter by chapter, Ezri elaborates the haunting back story of 677 Acacia Drive, involving bath water tainted with burning acid, the siblings’ chronic headaches, the sudden mass deaths of their pet fish. Nightmare Mother taunts the entire family, but only Ezri describes being possessed: “She makes me do things,” they tell their mother as a child. The youngest sister, Emmanuelle, had the protection of being sent to boarding school at 8, and wants to talk openly about “the woman without a face,” whereas Ezri and their middle sister, Eve, are warier. Using the siblings as foils throughout, Solomon reveals at the very end just how vastly their interpretations of their shared past diverge.
Unfortunately, Solomon is too narrowly focused on reiterating the depth and “inevitability” of pain to make good on this propulsive setup, their style too predictable and plodding. “Allow me to digress/regress,” Ezri begs the reader, seemingly aware of their own rambling and cliché. “Allow me an adolescent fury, expressible only via bad poetry. Gore. Skulls. Chains. Bones.”
But the reader can allow only so much ornamentation before the actual suffering loses resonance. Frustrated by an outsider who suggests the family believes in “impossible things,” Ezri invokes the Holocaust in such a cursory way as to render this global tragedy a mere talisman (“how could it be so, how such a sad, sad thing could be so — and yet, it is so”). To their therapist Ezri compares 677 to other haunted houses, like Grenfell Tower and “every house in Flint.” Recalling a poem they wrote at 13 “using ink I made from a dead dog’s blood,” Ezri compares themself to “the lake that a killer drowns his women in.” Both suspense and sympathy are drowned in this surfeit of melodrama.
Ezri has spent decades avoiding childhood memories of alienation and abuse, but it’s Elijah’s rare perspective — of the novel’s 36 chapters, three are told from the daughter’s point of view — that offers the most affecting representation of trauma. At 14, she is being groomed by a woman she met on the internet, and is torn when the woman invites her to her hotel room: “While Elijah knew this was coming, had hoped for this moment, in fact, she doesn’t fully know what to do with it now that it is here.”
It is a moving portrayal of complex and contradictory feelings toward an abuser, but Solomon’s decision to limit Elijah’s voice to the story of her entrapment makes her seem like more of a device for echoing Ezri’s pain than a character in her own right. (Perhaps this was intentional, a consequence of Ezri’s “adolescent fury” that blinds them to the actual adolescent at risk before their eyes, but as with the prose, the implementation is too conspicuous.)
Trauma may make a person write “bad poetry” and lose sight of the world, but it also has stranger edges, which become eclipsed by Solomon’s contrived machinations. Both Solomon, like Ezri, has let fatalism get the better of them, the gravity of their subject matter luring them to write an overwrought cautionary parable. The character at the center gets lost in the ambition.
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