Literary Leanings: Samanta Schweblin, Seven Empty Houses
A book review
I’m a couple years late to Seven Empty Houses, Samanta Schweblin’s 2022 short story collection. What can I say? It happens like that sometimes. This despite the fact that I scooped her three prior English-translated books (Fever Dream, Mouthful of Birds, Little Eyes) within weeks of their release. Seven Empty Houses reunites her with the short form for the first time since the Brian Evenson-esque Mouthful, but it’s a mixed bag. Each story features an original plot, that’s for sure. “My Parents & My Children” hinges on the narrators’ parents running around their yard butt-naked and spraying each other with a hose, while the protagonist of “None of That” teams up with her mother to “look at houses, [remove] unsuitable flowers and pots from their gardens. [we move] sprinklers, [straighten] mailboxes, [relocate] lawn ornaments that were too heavy for the grass” (16).
The humor is dark, yet it lends the collection the lightest feel of all her works so far; I’m all about that, because it adds new flavor to Schweblin’s work. Yet she’s stood firm on her main strength, excellent sentences. Check out these two beauties from “Two Square Feet.” “The Christmas tree is pint-sized, skinny, and a light, artificial green. It has round red ornaments, two gold garlands, and six Santa Claus figures dangling from the branches like a club of hanged men” (144), and “I suppose he opened the door and looked her up and down, sorry that someone so sodden would enter his shop” (148). The violent imagery that closes off the first passage twists familiar holiday image into something fresh, while the second’s assonant bounce kinda rules.
Unique stories, strong prose, sounds like a great collection, right? What I’m missing is the characters. In “Two Square Feet,” the protagonist “realize[s] what it is [she] wants” on page 151, which is two and a half pages before the story ends. Mr. Weimer, who features heavily in “It Happens All the Time in This House,” is strange and conflicted and could well have anchored a terrific story, but that tale’s first-person narrator just sort of, like, watches him and talks to him and secondhandedly reports on the man’s mourning of his missing son. Even “None of That,” one of the stories I enjoyed more here thanks to its irony-laden ending, cedes a lot more space to the relatively meek daughter than the human hurricane mother, who I suspect would’ve been one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction had she anchored the story.
The first-person narrators that populate these pages seem like observers within their own stories, watching people in their lives who pursue strong needs with a strange detached bemusement that they often come to understand as the story winds down. In other words, they feel passive, inert, and it keeps these tales from achieving their fullest flight. I know everyone thinks a short story needs an epiphany at the end for it to achieve proper literary status, but let’s be real here. Wouldn’t you rather follow, say, the mother in “None of That” as she pursues the strange situation she creates to its logical end? Thanks for nothing, John Updike. And, y’know, half the damn publishing industry.
The good news? Resident novella “Breath from the Depths” is one of Schweblin’s finest pieces. A creepy slow burn, it spins the warped yarn of a woman named Lola, who barricades herself within her house after a mysterious incident at a grocery store and schemes to work around her many anxieties, spurred primarily by her shaky memory and shadowy neighbors. Holy shit does it have some consequences. Schweblin excels at moody, mounting paranoia - hell, that’s how I’d sum up Fever Dream - and “Breath from the Depths” marks a strong entry into that canon. Lola’s frayed psychology is so well-rendered that it wraps around the story, and the reader follows her through a haze as stifling as it is immersive.
There’s one more banger among the shorter stories. “An Unlucky Man” spins the odd but compelling tale of a childhood birthday gone wrong in ways beyond all expectation, and it works as both a rich character study and a class in irony. If the rest of “Breath’s” supporting cast had been as strong, we’d be looking at one of ‘22’s best books. Instead we’ve got a great novella that could’ve used a little more meat around it. The highs are as good as anything Scwheblin’s done, but too much of this collection floats on by for me to recommend it as highly as I’d like to. Just read “Breath from the Depths” and “An Unlucky Man.” Those’ll see you through.