Debut novel addresses dealing with grief

When Luke dies before he finishes his young family’s new home, his widow must cope with leaving it behind

“This is The House That Luke Built”

By Violet Browne Goose Lane $22.95, 224 pages

The house that Luke built is both a physical structure and a haunted and haunting mental space.

Both are liminal, in-between kinds of zones. In the wake of Luke’s death — we know from the first sentence that he is gone — his wife, Rose, and their children ebb and bob and flounder in currents of direction, choice, happenstance and connections.

Rose grew up a fisherman’s daughter in Great Paradise, near Placentia, the middle of three girls (with Abby older and Cela younger). She herself only went fishing once, substituting for her sick mother.

Though the lines of the boat and water were clean and clear as “a Christopher Pratt painting” and the lunch of potted meat on homemade bread “one of the best she’s ever eaten,” she doesn’t want that life (she secretly sympathizes with the cod). Though she’s not tacking towards academia either — her grades are good, but she doesn’t apply herself (as the report cards say) — and abruptly drops out of high school.

Instead, she rebels herself in employment with — and later ownership of — a beauty salon, staying close to Placentia. Then, at a dance, she meets her future husband.

“Rose was delighted when she asked Luke what foods he liked and he said baked ham and lemon pie. She had been getting ready for him her whole life.”

They marry in 1991.

Both had children from previous relationships, hers being Maggie and Liam. Together, they have Emily. Emily is just 53 days old when Luke and the entire crew of the Elizabeth Coates drown off the Grand Banks on Oct. 13, 1994.

The story is set over multiple timelines, from 1978 to 2015, unfolding in oscillations and occasional returns. It’s more than a structural technique, although it does allow event and memory to propel the text. But it also shapes time itself into something of a character, one which is interacting with Rose in an unexpected, even transgressive, manner.

Grief, too, simple sheer unplacated grief, is a driving force. Though Luke and Rose weren’t together long, they were on some basic level truly meant for each other. Rose cannot absorb the fact and ritual of Luke’s funeral and, even a few years on, has days when she can’t leave the house or even the bed.

She’s also aware of the irony that, while she is aging (as are the children), he will always be a young man. She is sure of this because she sees him, visits him, on the anniversary of his death, in the unfinished framework of the house he was building, an otherworldly thread deftly woven into Rose’s quotidian day-to-day.

Chief among her concerns are, of course, her son and daughters, especially Emily, who was psychologically or perhaps spiritually unmoored by the loss of her father. Part of this manifests in her piercings and tattoos, including one (how could she have known?) eerily like one of Luke’s. Rose frets over the body ink, but knows the real danger is what brings her daughter repeatedly to the Janeway psychiatric services.

But Rose has her own restless priorities, too. She decides to move to St. John’s and study for a degree at MUN. After some back and forth, she buys a house on Monkstown Road (an actual house and the provenance and description of this are an extra treat for us downtown flaneurs), overlaying its historic bones with striking personal flourishes.

She also, at her sisters’ insistence, signs up for online dating and much, both ridiculous and worthwhile, ensues. In one sample textual exchange: “I love my wife very much. I’m here for a good reason actually. Besides being lonely when I’m away for work. I am a geologist and work in the woods a lot. The best way to find out when there is snow in the woods is to touch base with people in the area I will be visiting and ask them.”

A dubious Rose blocks him immediately.

But, then again, she never stays with any man for more than a year, as the calendar always comes back to October.

The narrative is almost always seen from Rose’s perspective, with brief, telling exception. There is some sentence repetition, deliberate and usually effective, including interludes underscored with recitations of “muscle sinew bone.”

This is a debut novel, but author Violet Browne also describes it as somewhat autobiographical, as she went through a similar tragedy. Such misadventures tend to raise unsettling questions of cause and effect, caprice and fate.

This resulting text, well-written, involving and considered, wrestles with whether to inhabit or escape the house that Luke built.