HOUSEMATES

A timely coming-of-age story about art and love from the author of The Third Rainbow Girl (2020).

This novel begins with a middle-aged photographer describing a lengthy bout of depression and isolation with oblique—but very telling—references to how the death of her “housemate” factored into her sense of despair. When she finally reemerges, she encounters “two white kids” in a coffee shop and follows them home. Then this unnamed observer disappears—for a while—as she tells the story of Bernie (who “looked like a thin girl”) and Leah (who “looked like a fat boy”). Within a handful of pages, Eisenberg establishes her novel’s central themes and the context in which this narrative is taking place. The physical setting is Philadelphia, although Leah and Bernie will embark on a road trip that takes them through central Pennsylvania—a place that is very much itself while also serving as synecdoche for flyover America. The 2016 presidential election and the Covid-19 pandemic offer temporal touchstones. Shifting mores around sexuality and gender, the complicated demands of social justice movements, how we deal with bad people who create good art, and the difference between recording and actually seeing are just some of the topics Eisenberg lays out before setting her Gen Z protagonists loose to explore them. Bernie and Leah meet when Bernie answers an ad that begins “Four Swarthmore grads, looking for a fifth housemate” and ends with “Queer preferred (we all are).” There are also mentions of proactive communication and a chore wheel. In this household, Bernie is an outsider, someone who is not attuned to—and not at all invested in—this kind of intentional living, and Bernie’s difference changes Leah. Eisenberg works through the issues she sets before the reader at the beginning of her novel with love and nuance. Or maybe it’s better to say that she lets her main characters fumble along in a world in which these issues matter. If that sounds pedantic or prescriptive, it’s not. Eisenberg has a poet’s eye for truth, and her prose is gorgeously precise and empathetic while remaining cleareyed.

Emotionally rich and quietly thought-provoking, this is simply a stunning fiction debut.