Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

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TW: Pedophelia, death of parent, child sexual assault, child abuse, animal cruelty, transphobia, body shaming, body horror, bullying, racism

A house is made of brick and wood and plaster. It is four walls and a roof, but a house is also all of these intangible things we can’t quite hold but can conceptualize. There are hopes and dreams held in a house. It’s a place where the past, present, and future live simultaneously. 

A house is often but not always a home. This distinction is apparent. A home is where a family lives. It’s a refuge from the greater world, a respite and center of community, or a keeping of pain and hurt.

Haunted house stories use all of these qualities to create a setting that often becomes its own character in the story. Model Home certainly knows the genre and uses its tropes and certainties to its advantage. 

"When we speak of a house that is haunted, all we are speaking of is a house that is violent, and many houses are violent. Mold-besmirched. Leaded water. Holes in the floor. Windows that let in cold. Heating that doesn’t work. Shitty cladding. In its end, Grenfell Tower was a haunted house. Every house in Flint, in so many cities, is a haunted house. So, 677 [Acacia Drive] was a shelter, a space, and everything so awful about it was not so different than many other houses” says Ezri.

Model Home follows Ezri and their family as they move from New York to Dallas and into a model home in a gated community. They are the only black family in the Oak Creek Estates but the Maxwells are excited for their new home. But bad things start to happen to the Maxwell family and as their family grows, tragedy after tragedy rains down on them. Years later, Ezri is back in their hometown after leaving. Questions arise and they and their family must face the truth.

That's the most you should know of the plot before reading. I think that the less you know, the better. 

I listened to this book and was at the edge of my metaphorical seat the whole time. Solomon not only captures the voice of their characters but creates the world in a way that feels like you could walk into it and be there.

That place makes the ambiance of the book what it is. It is that which lets the horror creep out and into your spine. When a character steps into a seemingly innocuous house during the day, you can feel the underlying menace. When family members talk, the tension of years seeps into their words. The nuanced contrast between Ezri’s mother's presence and how Ezri, at times, feels themselves as not whole and overshadowed person. 

In an interview, Solomon states: “Ezri has an extremely fractured, poorly realized identity. At many points in the novel, it’s evident they don’t see themself as a person or self at all. Still, they’re extraordinarily observant and self-examining. Getting into Ezri’s head was a little like writing about a subject the way a scientist might, with a very keen, cold, objective eye. I wrote Ezri the way I’d write someone filling out a lab report about themselves, trying desperately to understand something they never could.” 

This is just one example of the thought and complexity put into the characters. We get details of a character taking insulin for their diabetes, we get to see how jobs affect a character, and how they are allowed to be in their moments of calm. 

All of this rich life is created in the prose. A mixture of clinical and luscious language put us in a vivid and inescapable place. In which terror is right around the corner and trauma is omnipresent. 

So much of the book felt like a dream, or really a nightmare. There are many ghosts that haunt the siblings: supernatural parental, generational, historical, and personal. Whiteness is a monster, a predator. The expectations and parent’s guidance become more of a burdened inheritance than motivation. We become so poisoned by our own grief, that we might not be able to see and help those around us.

Pain and its inheritance is a huge topic. The brutality and dehumanization of racism is an ever-present haunt. How it harms in its madness not only obliterating the person of its target but also the surrounding communities and families. 

It is why the relationship between the siblings is so important. Bickering at times and loving at others, Ezri and their siblings are forced to face the house and all the secrets inside.

And again the contrasts make this all the more clear. The hope and hurt burn in their placement next to each other. They are close and loving and yet at times reject each other. They want to be embraced and yet don’t know how. 

"A family hurts. It does. We are born in its noose." 

This is a book where the monsters groom you to feel like you’re the monster. That we, in turn, become a haunting. The monsters of our childhood follow and haunt our actions and steps. 

In an interview at the New York Times, Spencer Quong states, “But the reader can allow only so much ornamentation before the actual suffering loses resonance.” But I reject this way of thinking. It is through Ezri and their recountings of the past that we have at times sympathy and more importantly awareness. Like Ezri, it is through these recountings that we journey toward understanding and facing the truth.

All of this culminated in an ending you won’t soon forget. I felt it was a bit rushed, it didn’t take its time like the rest of the novel, and (this is more a fault with me as the reader) the movie watcher in me wanted everything to be tied into a bow. I wanted the monsters to be forced into the light and help to save the day. 

Solomon delivers on the promises they make in the beginning. We are left with humanity, pared down and ripe with horrors, in a bittersweet finale. 

This is a bold, haunting, beautiful, and grief-filled book.

I can’t stop thinking of Ezri, the Maxwell family, and how Solomon wrote their haunting. But, I also can’t stop thinking of the quiet moments. The displays of love and hate in being a family. The exploration of queerness and gender and most of the discoveries of self and what it means to be human. 

Further Reading:

Beloved by Toni Morrison was one of the first books that comes to mind.

Quotes:

“There is no way to describe a person that is not a reduction.” 

“Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will. […] Soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.” 

“How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.”

“...When we speak of a house that is haunted, all we are speaking of is a house that is violent. And many houses are violent.”

“was it me all along, deluded and deranged who made [the house] into something sinister? It is me who haunts, me who is the ghost?”

"i'm not a person but a place where bad things happen."

SPOILERS (and a bit of rambling)

When Ezri realizes how much their mom was going through and how they feel as overwhelmed as a now parent. 

I can’t stop thinking about the end. How they left Nightmare Mother to no justice. How there was seemingly no immediate justice in the neighborhood. 

I couldn't stop crying at the end. 

The imagery of the model home. Those ghosts of people viewing it, moving in it, imagining their lives in it echoing the later terror from the neighbors. 

How Ezri’s unreliability as a narrator comes to a head at the end. How Laura still haunted them and their home years later. The terror and ugliness of her revealed.

The unresolved acceptance between Ezri and their child, Elijah. 

The indisputable power of ‘mother’ as a force for good and bad. 

Thank you to Rivers Solomon, Macmillan Audio, Farrah, Straus, and Giroux, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.