The house, and letting go

Robert Crooke is a novelist now. He’s been a journalist, then a media executive, then other things. Letting the House Go is his fifth novel, published in 2022 by a small press in Portland, Oregon, called Unsolicited. The cover of the paperback shows a blurred autumnal scene, leaves in vibrant color. The vibration makes it hard to see much of anything clearly about the setting. That’s what the protagonist, Richard Morris, must feel like as he arrives in his old hometown, on Long Island, because his ex-wife is in a hospice awaiting the inevitable. They separated a long time ago.

She has asked him to be executor of her will. Is he really the only person she can trust?  And there’s the house, the house they still own together, full of his possessions as well as hers. She has a painting on the wall by a semi-famous Long Island artist. Its value? A few million dollars. She faces claims that it was acquired unfairly decades ago.

Morris is a novelist, working on a new book that will tell a tale that’s autobiographical in character, though we know that fiction is not a guarantor of truth. He’s about to discover more truths, more than he might wish for.

Letting the House Go is a lyrical piece of writing, not elegiac, more introspective, private. It tells us more than perhaps we want to know about this character’s life and family, more than a novelist should, though not more than readers might want to find out, once they get their boots stuck into the characters’ muck. It hurts. A good hurt.

[Disclosure: Bob Crooke and I were colleagues for quite a few years at Reuters. We didn’t work all that closely together, however, but I knew him well enough then to respect him. I’ve another novel of his waiting to be read. I hope to get to that soon.]