Book Reviews

The House of Gentle Men

Bard, 320 pp., $22

A man can buy sex, if that's what he craves, if that's what's missing in his life. But what's missing in that working girl's life, or in the life of his wife back home? Maybe just kisses and compliments; slow dancing and gentle caresses; an attentive and sympathetic ear.

For those women, and women like Charlotte, the protagonist of this new novel, who have even deeper griefs, Austin writer Kathy Hepinstall has imagined the House of Gentle Men: "a house where men could live in the service of unkissed, overworked, unappreciated, tired, sad, prematurely gray, widowed, nervously single, despondently married women. Sad women, starving for love, their bodies married to labor. -- A secret place to which they could flee and be women again, kissed and waltzed against, whispered to, touched with just the fingertips."

The House of Gentle Men, Hepinstall's first novel, dances deftly along that uniquely Southern line between realism and magic realism, conjuring a world that just slightly blurs the distinction between the wondrous and the everyday. The book is already generating interest and praise, and no wonder. Set in rural Louisiana just after World War II, this is a deeply poetic novel, haunting as a fable, and enormously generous of spirit.

At the House of Gentle Men, women can get whatever they want except actual intercourse -- too violent, says Leon Olen, the sad, penitential fellow who founded the place because he "had let his own wife slip through his long fingers due to his sustained and dreamy neglect."

It may sound as if the book marches to a simplistic drumbeat -- Oh the poor women! Oh the dreadful men! -- but in fact it is far more complex. Yes, Charlotte turns mute and withdrawn after a series of terrible blows as a teenager, including a gang rape and resulting pregnancy. But she is not the only sufferer. Her brother Milo, for example, cannot stop talking, his agitation driven by profound and unearned guilt over their mother's death.

Nor do all the women suffer. Cleanliness-obsessed Louise sneers at the men who work through their guilt at her father's "houseful of boneless love." Untouched by life, she longs for a "bad" man and falls hard for a suicidal, guilt-wracked soldier who comes to the house to heal.

Louise's brother Ben seduces and casts off some of the soothed and dreamy women who emerge from the House of Gentle Men. But when he finally needs advice about winning a woman, an old doctor urges him simply to listen: ""They hurt to tell their story. It's usually sad and it's usually about some other man who's done them wrong or hit them or left them at the altar, or told them they looked fat in a sundress. Just listen to them, Ben.'"

Hepinstall's prose can slip gracefully from this sort of wry tenderness into a sure lyric voice: "The night was good for love, in the same way some nights are good for fishing. The moon pulls at a certain angle, the air turns a certain flavor, the breeze releases a certain amount of sugar and salt. And men and women respond to the changes, and their angel souls rock inside their animal bodies like catboats in a furious sea."

The course of the novel is steered by grace, which blesses nearly all the characters, no matter their griefs or sins. Charlotte and the guilt-torn Justin begin to heal each other, using the house and its rules as a transition place, with kisses "sweet and tender, sad beyond depth."

Other characters win a simpler and deeper blessing, realizing "that chores could be glorious; that throwing scraps to a hungry dog was love; and tending a garden was love; -- and kissing the forehead of an aging parent who mixed small talk and prayers in crazy patterns was love -- and that they were born to this love, as satin is born to the long, slow, stitch." The love inherent in the mundane, the damaged, the wicked, the small, the ordinary, is both the subject of The House of Gentle Men and the tender grace that informs it.