Infinite Home (Alcott)

Infinite Home 
Katlhleen Alcott, 2015
Penguin
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594633638


Summary
A beautifully wrought story of an ad hoc family and the crisis they must overcome together.

Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter.

Crippled in various ways—in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart—the renters struggle to navigate daily existence, and soon come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.

Faced with eviction by Owen and his designs on the building, the tenants—Paulie, an unusually disabled man and his burdened sister, Claudia; Edward, a misanthropic stand-up comic; Adeleine, a beautiful agoraphobe; Thomas, a young artist recovering from a stroke—must find in one another what the world has not yet offered or has taken from them: family, respite, security, worth, love.

The threat to their home scatters them far from where they’ve begun, to an ascetic commune in Northern California, the motel rooms of depressed middle America, and a stunning natural phenomenon in Tennessee, endangering their lives and their visions of themselves along the way.

With humanity, humor, grace, and striking prose, Kathleen Alcott portrays these unforgettable characters in their search for connection, for a life worth living, for home. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988-89
• Where—Petaluma, California, USA
• Education—Chapman University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York


Kathleen Alcott is the author of the 2012 novel The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, which was translated into several languages. Her second novel Infinite Home was released in 2015.

Alcott's fiction, criticism, and essays appear in publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Coffin Factory, Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Born in Northern California, she currently resides in Brooklyn. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Kathleen Alcott's second novel takes on a big question—what makes a "home" a "home"?—and answers with stunning originality.... Beyond this compelling story, Alcott's incredibly accomplished prose is good reason to put Infinite Home at the very top of your to-read list.
Bustle.com


Alcott’s new novel takes place in a sprawling Brooklyn brownstone, offering a peek into the complicated lives of the tenants who have come to live in it.... The writing is dreamy and easy to inhabit, but is occasionally undermined by its tendency toward abstraction, when it would benefit more from precise plot development. Nevertheless, Alcott’s writing is generous, and her peculiar cast of characters memorable.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) In her quietly wonderful second book, Alcott displays a deft hand with every one of her odd and startlingly real characters.... Their situation may not be enviable, but Alcott's handling of it is. The voices in this book speak volumes. A luminous second novel from a first-class storyteller.
Kirkus Reviews

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