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The Dead of the House
The Dead of the House was the first and only novel to be published by the late Hannah Green. Originally issued in 1972, it won lavish praise from critics and readers alike. Yet the novel, which took the author almost 20 years to write, went out of print for almost another two decades, until it was reissued in 1996. Today its virtues are no less evident. Green's lyricism transforms the fairly mundane fabric of her childhood--spent in Ohio and on the Lake Michigan shore--into exquisite, elaborately-worked prose.
225 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2000
About the author
Hannah Green
5 books6 followersNot to be confused with Hannah Green, pseudonym of Joanne Greenberg.
Hannah Green (1927–1996) was an American author. The re-release of her classic work, The Dead of the House, was received with almost as much critical enthusiasm as its original publication in 1972. She was born in Ohio and lived most of her adult life in New York. As an undergraduate at Wellesley, she enrolled in Vladimir Nabokov's survey of Russian literature in translation, which she later wrote about in The New Yorker. Ms. Green completed her MFA at Stanford University with Wallace Stegner. There she met Tillie Olsen, and the two began a lifelong friendship. In 1960, she was a recipient of the first of many MacDowell Colony residencies. Among her published work are articles in The New Yorker, the books, The Dead of the House and Little Saint: My Book of the Hours of Saint Foy (published posthumously in 2000), and the children's book, In the City of Paris. For several years, Ms. Green taught in the writing programs of Columbia University and New York University. Until her death in 1996, she was married to the American artist John Wesley.
Hannah Green (1927–1996) was an American author. The re-release of her classic work, The Dead of the House, was received with almost as much critical enthusiasm as its original publication in 1972. She was born in Ohio and lived most of her adult life in New York. As an undergraduate at Wellesley, she enrolled in Vladimir Nabokov's survey of Russian literature in translation, which she later wrote about in The New Yorker. Ms. Green completed her MFA at Stanford University with Wallace Stegner. There she met Tillie Olsen, and the two began a lifelong friendship. In 1960, she was a recipient of the first of many MacDowell Colony residencies. Among her published work are articles in The New Yorker, the books, The Dead of the House and Little Saint: My Book of the Hours of Saint Foy (published posthumously in 2000), and the children's book, In the City of Paris. For several years, Ms. Green taught in the writing programs of Columbia University and New York University. Until her death in 1996, she was married to the American artist John Wesley.
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March 5, 2023
Two facts about The Dead of the House (1972) immediately attracted my attention: it took Hannah Green twenty years to write this novel and it is the one and only book for adults she published in her lifetime. In our era of literary mass production such perfectionism sounds quite baffling, doesn't it?
Seemingly, The Dead of the House is a quiet and subdued blend of a multigenerational family saga and a coming-of-age novel, intertwined with the history of North America, especially Ohio and Lake Michigan surroundings. It is also one of the most piercing tales of the inevitability of death and the transience of life that I have ever read. I found it achingly beautiful and despite the title not depressing or gloomy. According to the author, it is a very real book, which is, in fact, a dream. I got the idea from life, but I have proceeded from vision. I have made use in equal parts of memory, record, and imagination. Although the narrator is called Vanessa, she seems to be Hannah Green's alter ego and most of the characters' portraits are based on her family members.
The Dead of the House resembles a braid neatly plaited from three strands. The first one is the narrator's grandfather's memories, sprinkled with his poems, family-related documents and recollections of ancestors. The second one is Vanessa's reminiscences of her childhood and youth. The two narratives have distinctly different styles. The grandfather's story is succinct, matter-of-fact and concrete, full of names of people and places, the Native American versions included. You immediately get the impression that most of the anecdotes and episodes had been told hundreds of times and passed from generation to generation, with every oral storyteller leaving his little mark. Vanessa's narration is impressionistic and sensual, much more sublime and literary. The third strand is the history of the United States which affects the family's past.
Actually, there is the fourth strand in the braid, unwritten and invisible: every reader's own childhood memories, one picture leading into another. It makes us reflect on the change of generations, the inseparable intertwining of life and death. The central symbol in the novel is water to illustrate the passing of time, among other things. There are many scenes depicting swimming and canoeing. Besides, a lake plays an important and dramatic role in the plot.
One of the most astounding things about The Dead of the House is a gallery of Vanessa's eccentric relatives' portrayals. For instance, great-aunt Honora who loved to walk on the heathery moors like the Brontë sisters, or cousin Cato who swallowed a goldfish worth five hundred dollars and ate ninety-nine bananas, hopefully not on the same day, or poor great-grandfather who got so engrossed in Tess of the D'Urbervilles that was run over by a train! I wish the editors had foreseen that the numerous relatives mentioned in the book might be easy to confuse. To be honest, it took me a frustrating while to identify who was who. Such a pity a family tree was not included.
Wallace Stegner argues that in The Dead of the House you can encounter evocation at the level of magic. I could feel it too. There are stunning passages in Hannah Green's novel indeed although I found it a bit uneven as a whole. I think this fragment captures the quintessence of the book: Is it not strange that very recently bygone images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes blown from the Spice Islands of Youth and Hope, those twin realities of this phantom world. It is much more than a typical walk down the nostalgia lane. The world of the past depicted by Hannah Green is full of flavours, scents, sounds, emotions. It is luminous too — The Dead of the House made me think of a passage from The Years by Annie Ernaux which I am reading at the moment: The distance that separates past from present can be measured, perhaps, by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress—by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken.
Artwork by nuvolanevicata.
Seemingly, The Dead of the House is a quiet and subdued blend of a multigenerational family saga and a coming-of-age novel, intertwined with the history of North America, especially Ohio and Lake Michigan surroundings. It is also one of the most piercing tales of the inevitability of death and the transience of life that I have ever read. I found it achingly beautiful and despite the title not depressing or gloomy. According to the author, it is a very real book, which is, in fact, a dream. I got the idea from life, but I have proceeded from vision. I have made use in equal parts of memory, record, and imagination. Although the narrator is called Vanessa, she seems to be Hannah Green's alter ego and most of the characters' portraits are based on her family members.
The Dead of the House resembles a braid neatly plaited from three strands. The first one is the narrator's grandfather's memories, sprinkled with his poems, family-related documents and recollections of ancestors. The second one is Vanessa's reminiscences of her childhood and youth. The two narratives have distinctly different styles. The grandfather's story is succinct, matter-of-fact and concrete, full of names of people and places, the Native American versions included. You immediately get the impression that most of the anecdotes and episodes had been told hundreds of times and passed from generation to generation, with every oral storyteller leaving his little mark. Vanessa's narration is impressionistic and sensual, much more sublime and literary. The third strand is the history of the United States which affects the family's past.
Actually, there is the fourth strand in the braid, unwritten and invisible: every reader's own childhood memories, one picture leading into another. It makes us reflect on the change of generations, the inseparable intertwining of life and death. The central symbol in the novel is water to illustrate the passing of time, among other things. There are many scenes depicting swimming and canoeing. Besides, a lake plays an important and dramatic role in the plot.
One of the most astounding things about The Dead of the House is a gallery of Vanessa's eccentric relatives' portrayals. For instance, great-aunt Honora who loved to walk on the heathery moors like the Brontë sisters, or cousin Cato who swallowed a goldfish worth five hundred dollars and ate ninety-nine bananas, hopefully not on the same day, or poor great-grandfather who got so engrossed in Tess of the D'Urbervilles that was run over by a train! I wish the editors had foreseen that the numerous relatives mentioned in the book might be easy to confuse. To be honest, it took me a frustrating while to identify who was who. Such a pity a family tree was not included.
Wallace Stegner argues that in The Dead of the House you can encounter evocation at the level of magic. I could feel it too. There are stunning passages in Hannah Green's novel indeed although I found it a bit uneven as a whole. I think this fragment captures the quintessence of the book: Is it not strange that very recently bygone images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes blown from the Spice Islands of Youth and Hope, those twin realities of this phantom world. It is much more than a typical walk down the nostalgia lane. The world of the past depicted by Hannah Green is full of flavours, scents, sounds, emotions. It is luminous too — The Dead of the House made me think of a passage from The Years by Annie Ernaux which I am reading at the moment: The distance that separates past from present can be measured, perhaps, by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress—by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken.
Artwork by nuvolanevicata.
April 4, 2009
A gorgeous, quiet, unusual novel about a young woman in thrall with her her father; her grandfather; the Michigan woods; and the pioneering, storytelling line from which she descends. This is the kind of book whose voice gets into your head and changes, for a while, the way you describe things to yourself.
I found the novel through a list the critic Lee Sandlin had on the blog Neglected Books. He says: "I've never read anything like this book. What appears at first to be a shapeless and garrulous memoir of suburban America in the middle of the 20th century gradually reveals itself to be a visionary prose poem about the way time and
history are interfused in the American landscape."
I found the novel through a list the critic Lee Sandlin had on the blog Neglected Books. He says: "I've never read anything like this book. What appears at first to be a shapeless and garrulous memoir of suburban America in the middle of the 20th century gradually reveals itself to be a visionary prose poem about the way time and
history are interfused in the American landscape."
September 3, 2013
Hannah Green (who is not Joanne Greenberg - Goodreads has collapsed the authors together http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/18/art...) did not publish much in her lifetime. This spare book, written from the vantage of a daughter/granddaughter in the 40s and 50s, looks back deep in the 19th century for family history and moves forward with a thoughtful deliberateness through three different points in time. I picked it up at a booksale due to a blurb from Wallace Stegner "whenever I want to remind myself of how it felt to be young..." and a comparison to Wendell Berry's Nathan Coulter. Here the blurbs speak the truth. The book creates history and longing, the joys and pains of youth and of family, clearly evoking place and time effortlessly. It is beautiful and even as I read it relentlessly I tried to slow down to enjoy the ever fewer number of pages.
April 24, 2018
Note: There is a Joanne Greenberg who writes under the name Hannah Green, most famous for writing I Never Promised You a Rosegarden, but she is different, alive for one, from the Hannah Green who wrote The Dead of the House. So the Goodreads citation of author above is incorrect. On to the review.
Not counting one children’s book, The Dead in the House, is apparently one of two books Hannah Green wrote in her life (1927-1996). It is a beautiful elegiac novel of family, love and loss, and history, or at least the linked biological and historical connections of generations. If you are only going to write two in your lifetime and this is one, you have done right by your talent and right in your contribution to the world.
Vanessa, the young narrator, is strongly connected to her family, even those she only knows from family stories, her grandparents’ grandparents. The book is in three parts, with each part debuting in The New Yorker (1966, 69, and 70 respectively). The first section is called “In My Grandfather’s House.” The second, the most elegiac, is “Summer Afternoon, Summer Afternoon,” and the third, “And Here Tecumseh Fell.” Each is excellent, the second may be perfect.
From the first section:
From the middle part:
From the third section, when Vanessa is an adult with children of her own and has moved away:
Green’s perspective may be one that is fading from view in the 21st century, where things continue their nuclear movement into a smaller, more immediate sense of time, family and community. The book isn’t nostalgic but it is memorial in a sadder way than the narrator may find it. The narrator’s understanding of things past is both one of loss but also of continuity. She sees herself in her family, past and present, and recognizes that she is connected in many ways to the generations that preceded and owes a responsibility to those that follow her. It’s a good way to be and Green’s sensitive, evocative, deeply felt prose renders it without sentimentality. The Dead in the House is poignant and moving, a small masterpiece that will be re-read (and be a gift) in the years ahead.
Not counting one children’s book, The Dead in the House, is apparently one of two books Hannah Green wrote in her life (1927-1996). It is a beautiful elegiac novel of family, love and loss, and history, or at least the linked biological and historical connections of generations. If you are only going to write two in your lifetime and this is one, you have done right by your talent and right in your contribution to the world.
Vanessa, the young narrator, is strongly connected to her family, even those she only knows from family stories, her grandparents’ grandparents. The book is in three parts, with each part debuting in The New Yorker (1966, 69, and 70 respectively). The first section is called “In My Grandfather’s House.” The second, the most elegiac, is “Summer Afternoon, Summer Afternoon,” and the third, “And Here Tecumseh Fell.” Each is excellent, the second may be perfect.
From the first section:
“Happy I carried in the wood from the branches of trees Grandpa Nye had felled in the woods himself. He chopped the logs and split them. He was famous for his skill with the ax. ‘None of us could keep up with him,’ Daddy said. When Daddy was little, he used to go along every Saturday afternoon when Grandpa Nye went with his wheelbarrow into the woods below his house to chop wood. …For many years the sound of Grandpa Nye’s ax could be heard in the neighborhood, and when he was very old and no longer able to chop wood, in his ninetieth year, he could still be seen on certain afternoons in the old hat he wore around the place in spite of what Aunt Janice said, and in his woodsmen coat, walking slowly down Salt Lick Avenue with his wheelbarrow.”
From the middle part:
“One afternoon late in October when we got home from school there was a letter from Dirk in a white envelope with a Yale crest on it. I turned to the second page. He signed it ‘Love and Kisses.’ I went into the lavatory by the front door and doubled over. I couldn’t breathe. The washstand blazed white in front of my eyes.
I didn’t see him again until it was summer again. Mama was working at the draft board and no one went to Neah that summer of 1943. I was a junior counselor at Camp Claybanks near Glendale, and Dirk came there to see me the night before he went to Chicago to boot camp. It was nearly ten o’clock when he got there, and then we took a walk down the road to the camp entrance. It was a hot moonless night. The dark shape of the elms loomed against the sky, and the fireflies were like stars in the fragrant fields of hay.
…He put his arm around my waist. ‘Gee, Vanessa, you’re swell,’ he said. Then I felt the sweet wet feel of his mouth, the soft quick feel of the life inside him. We put our heads alongside each other, and our arms around each other. I was afraid we might tip over.”
From the third section, when Vanessa is an adult with children of her own and has moved away:
“Away from here I was free of the love that made me cry all the time, but away from here I wasn’t here where I belonged. Here slowly everything changed. I had to look to what was left of what I loved.”
Green’s perspective may be one that is fading from view in the 21st century, where things continue their nuclear movement into a smaller, more immediate sense of time, family and community. The book isn’t nostalgic but it is memorial in a sadder way than the narrator may find it. The narrator’s understanding of things past is both one of loss but also of continuity. She sees herself in her family, past and present, and recognizes that she is connected in many ways to the generations that preceded and owes a responsibility to those that follow her. It’s a good way to be and Green’s sensitive, evocative, deeply felt prose renders it without sentimentality. The Dead in the House is poignant and moving, a small masterpiece that will be re-read (and be a gift) in the years ahead.
August 3, 2013
Beautiful. The description of the summer evening in Ohio before they leave for Lake Michigan hits all the senses and seems like poetry. Characters' relation to nature, especially when swimming in rivers and lakes gives a visceral immediacy to events that span generations.
Fluid. The story flows across generations and events in the life of the protagonist with seemingly little effort. Gives a great impression of the history of the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley parts of U.S. and Canada without lecturing at all.
Evocative. A section is written from the perspective of a teenage girl and conveys the moods and energy of teens. The novel conveys the complexities of relationships, and emotional and psychological reactions among family members.
Fluid. The story flows across generations and events in the life of the protagonist with seemingly little effort. Gives a great impression of the history of the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley parts of U.S. and Canada without lecturing at all.
Evocative. A section is written from the perspective of a teenage girl and conveys the moods and energy of teens. The novel conveys the complexities of relationships, and emotional and psychological reactions among family members.
February 16, 2015
A quiet, affecting, but sometimes plodding coming-of-age story that gets a bit muddled in its narrative – the girl's (author's) story interspersed with her grandfather's story can be confusing, but ultimately what comes through and is memorable is the abiding love for and solace of the natural world. Many rave about this book, but my 3 stars are not as enthusiastic as other 3 stars ratings I've given...
January 19, 2013
I just couldnt get into this book
October 7, 2023
I learned of this book from an old article in Cincinnati Magazine from 1979 describing numerous “Summer Places” where Cincinnatians stay in cottage communities during the warmer months. A few of them were in Michigan, including Neahtawantah on the West Bay of Grand Traverse Bay. I had been looking for information about places like Neahtawantah and Northport Point and according to the article, "Hannah Green, The New Yorker writer and former Glendalian, immortalized Neahtawanta in her novel, The Dead of the House,” so I decided to read it.
The novel is a nostalgic and genealogical tale of the narrator's family and upbringing which mostly takes place in Cincinnati where much of her big, multi-generational family lives. The early sections of the book deal extensively with her ancestors including their lives in Europe before coming to America and Canada and there are many relations to keep track of which can be a struggle. But the section also brings out some of the themes of the novel like pioneers versus businessmen and woodsmen versus readers.
That’s where Neahtawantah comes up. It’s a summer resort where the narrator, Vanessa, and her sister, Lisa, grow up swimming and sailing in Bower’s Harbor and socializing with other families from Cincinnati that also spend the summer there. And it’s a counterpoint to her life in Ohio where she “used to wait miserably through the winter to be back in Michigan, running through the woods, running up the beach again into the wind.” There are many scenes captured from her family’s trips out of the city and up north for the summer from the all day drive from Ohio to Northern Michigan, to a deep crush she has on a boy, Dirk, who also goes to “Neah” for the summers.
After I slogged through the genealogical passages of the novel I thought I wasn’t going to like it but the book later takes on some more conventional story lines involving some secrets in the family, some compromises, and some unexpected joys, and while mortality hangs over quite a bit of it there are many scenes of Midwestern life that knit together a complete picture of this sprawling family with a history going back several generations in Ohio, Michigan, and Canada. I realized that the genealogy helps to build and support the ideas, experiences, and characters of the narrator and her family and these early passages are as essential to the final effect of the novel as any other section is. The recounting of family stories both from the narrator’s perspective and from her family members’ is the main narrative technique here and the many tales and the many characters all help to make up an unforgettable tapestry.
The novel is a nostalgic and genealogical tale of the narrator's family and upbringing which mostly takes place in Cincinnati where much of her big, multi-generational family lives. The early sections of the book deal extensively with her ancestors including their lives in Europe before coming to America and Canada and there are many relations to keep track of which can be a struggle. But the section also brings out some of the themes of the novel like pioneers versus businessmen and woodsmen versus readers.
That’s where Neahtawantah comes up. It’s a summer resort where the narrator, Vanessa, and her sister, Lisa, grow up swimming and sailing in Bower’s Harbor and socializing with other families from Cincinnati that also spend the summer there. And it’s a counterpoint to her life in Ohio where she “used to wait miserably through the winter to be back in Michigan, running through the woods, running up the beach again into the wind.” There are many scenes captured from her family’s trips out of the city and up north for the summer from the all day drive from Ohio to Northern Michigan, to a deep crush she has on a boy, Dirk, who also goes to “Neah” for the summers.
After I slogged through the genealogical passages of the novel I thought I wasn’t going to like it but the book later takes on some more conventional story lines involving some secrets in the family, some compromises, and some unexpected joys, and while mortality hangs over quite a bit of it there are many scenes of Midwestern life that knit together a complete picture of this sprawling family with a history going back several generations in Ohio, Michigan, and Canada. I realized that the genealogy helps to build and support the ideas, experiences, and characters of the narrator and her family and these early passages are as essential to the final effect of the novel as any other section is. The recounting of family stories both from the narrator’s perspective and from her family members’ is the main narrative technique here and the many tales and the many characters all help to make up an unforgettable tapestry.
January 11, 2020
A wonderful read that starts off slowly but that is well worth it to stick it out. The chapter “Summer Afternoon, Summer Afternoon” is a true rendition of what childhood felt like.
May 14, 2020
Unique, dreamlike. Loved this one.
November 22, 2023
Excellent.
April 3, 2020
A beautiful work of prose about history, family, love. Evocation of a way of life that will not return.
December 31, 2007
I remember this book! When I was a teenager, I read -- and reread -- and reread -- I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and then went on a hunt for all of her books. While it didn't sing to me the way "Rose Garden" did, I enjoyed it; books like this one, which I discovered at random, were probably the reason I ended up majoring in English in college. I've often wondered what became of this one, and to Hannah Green!
June 3, 2008
Another outtatheparker at first at-bat. Talk about shooting all your guns. Followed by 20 years of silence. Fascinating. And all in the service of an incredibly restrained, never released Yupper Calvinism. Doubly fascinating.
Her next book was a study of a minor saint cult in Provence. Triply fascinating...
Her next book was a study of a minor saint cult in Provence. Triply fascinating...
September 30, 2010
Stories of an American family, and of the keepers of the stories, the ones told at reunions and wakes, and the ones told only to one's self, as if perfectly remembered decades later. Reads like discovering an old photo album in your parents' attic; rich and bittersweet.
September 7, 2016
This is a remarkable book. It draws you in so that by the end, you don't want it to be finished. I closed the back cover, just amazed at the story and the incredible writing. This will possibly be one of my favorite books for a long time to come.
June 11, 2015
I found the book very difficult to figure out because Everyone started talking about history in the family. I didn't really like how Vanessa was treat by her mom and her sister, Lisa because Mom played favorites. I kept nodding off between each man recalling history: Dad, Grandpa Nye and so on.
August 27, 2015
rambling, very unclear semi-geneaology of a fictional grandfather's personal history. if you have an interest in OH or Canada & the 19th c then maybe this is for you. very short bk which was too long for me.
September 14, 2012
Evocative, made me long to hear again the family stories told by my Grandfather. Simply put, this book is exquisite.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews