A Book Review? A Diary Entry? Both?



I just read a book. 

I knew two facts when I started it, 1) the characters were queer and 2) it was available at the OCPL. Everything else was a surprise.  

Turns out the novel is about two artists on a road trip through Pennsylvania. Imagine that! I used to live there. 

Here are some other facts I learned. Our main characters are a photographer and a journalist/writer. The setting is primarily in Eastern and Central PA, and bursting with specific and precise descriptions of Philidelphia streets and city life (communal living! university students! gentrification!). 

The start of the book is just fine, but its unusual narrator* caught my attention and kept me reading long enough to get me fully invested in the characters, and the places they were going. 

Part one is about attention. About being picked, or perhaps, getting someone to pick you. Having a mentor, being a mentee. It touches on what it's like to get something really important, maybe even life-changing. But not life-changing in a North Star kind of way, life-changing in a Rub-Goldberg machine kind of way. The end was too obscure to even imagine at the start. 

It's easy to assume you have control over what a relationship is. Easy for a person to be really important to you, but also just like.... some guy. But they're a person too. They have their own surprises. Their own flaws. 

The second part could have been about the fallout of that. Of being connected to someone who, it turns out, is pretty shitty. And then about having that connection be made permanent, and, in some ways, public. And at some points that is what it's about, but mostly it's not

Mostly it's a road trip novel. To me, it's a love letter to Pennsylvania. An honest, measured love letter, but still. 

Our main characters borrow a car, pack up a finicky, bulky, old camera, and start their journey. We get many descriptions of storefronts spotted while driving through small towns outside of Lancaster, gas station food, and the weather. At one point there's a cave. It's similar to the ones I have been to in PA but distinctly different in that it is explored by boat. There's a funny wedding. Many friendly strangers. And a crumbling, but loved dive bar in Hagerstown. Each new destination gives me a pleasant buzz of familiarity. I've not been to these places, but I can picture easily. 

At one point the narrator marvels "Through the rain, Leah saw log cabins and wooden houses set back from the road, shielded by great trees with red-brown bark. Confederate flags. Tibetan peace flags. Lifted pickup trucks. VW buses. What was this place, Pennsylvania, that had two hearts?" 

If I was a more dramatic person I would spend the rest of my life quoting that last sentence. Nothing has made me feel connected to PA quite like that description. 

To my surprise, the car does make it to the Western side of the state (this was not the plan) and our characters, who I have grown quite attached to, are suddenly places I've spent significant portions of my life. 

There's a hotel in Pittsburgh, the library in Kittaning (I worked there in 2018), and a gas station in my college town. But when hearing about places I knew quite well something changed, I could only wonder about the information I didn't have. 

Was the hotel Downtown? Near the Point? When they went to the library did they notice the stained glass windows of the church beside it? This book takes place in the summer, was there a festival happening along the river? When they stopped for gas did they go to the Sheetz or the Country Fair? How far into town did they drive? Far enough to see the mural made of street signs at the Penn DOT building?


Kittaning circa 2018 (sorry for the Instagram filters)

Maybe there is insight here about the difference between the familiar and the known? When something is familiar each piece of it feels warm, and when it's known each piece that isn't there feels like it's missing.**

Inevitably the rest of the book falls into this dichotomy for me. 

A friendly cat who has favorites- known. 

Gatherings in public city parks- familiar. 

Very real headlines from 2016- 2020- known. 

Five housemates crowded into one room to watch a movie- familiar, but perhaps also a little known. 

A brother and sister talking while eating cheese after a fight with their parents- known. 

A taste of success that makes you feel a little unstoppable- familiar. 

There is, of course, a love story here. It's predictable but not formulaic. The dichotomy disperses for this one.  It seems known, then familiar, then unknown. Flickering. A candle being carried through the dark. 

This book does this thing that seems common in contemporary fiction; the first 300 pages cover three weeks and the last 30 about three years. And yet, the ending still feels like it rambles. Still takes its time wrapping up each plot line, making the point it wants to make. When it gets there, it feels a bit like home. 


Sorry for the unusual review, to be clear, I would recommend this book. The story takes moments that could be quite sharp and makes them pretty soft, perhaps even gentle.*** And I liked that. 

Book: Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg 

Rating: One large format camera, painstakingly set up in a misty rain, then disrupted, at the last second, by the red streak of a dog running through the frame. 

                                                                        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Sorry in advance for the incredibly long footnote but there was one more thing about this book that I cannot get off my mind but does not fit into the format of the above post. The first chapter is entirely about a 70-year-old artist whose partner died a decade prior, but who is only now really feeling the grief of that loss. She's a photographer, but all of her equipment and photos are in a closet that she does not open. She wakes up and spends her days watching animal videos on YouTube and only leaves her house to go to the corner store down the street. I felt deeply connected to her. One day she musters the courage to walk several blocks to a coffee shop where she sits down next to our two main characters and overhears their plans for a road trip. She follows them out of the coffee shop, stops on the corner, and watches them enter their house. Then the most peculiar thing happens. Some part of her leaves herself and slips through the cracks of the windows and eavesdrops, silently, invisibly, on our main characters. This book is perfectly grounded and plausible, in fact, in the second and third parts it continuously references very real events we have all lived through. And yet! This narrator is an independent character. She interacts with the main characters multiple times. But she also contains all the insight and distance that you'd expect from an omniscient narrator. Her all-knowingness is never explained. The acknowledgments on the last page note that, while the characters in the novel are fictional, they are based on real people. Maybe she is suppose to be one of those real people? Perhaps, if I googled some names I'd get more clarity, but I spent the whole book not knowing this information and see no reason to start knowing now.+

+ This is a lie. I am sure in the next few days I will google at least a few of the names. 

** BUT ALSO it seems pretty likely to me that the author had actually been to places mentioned up until that point, or at least had talked to people who had been there. But for the western side of the state she just found some towns near highways and wrote their names in. 

*** Okay, except for once. ONE TIME things get a little sharp. 



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