New Books In Literature

Ryan Ridge‘s American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is at odds with category: it doesn’t really fit neatly, or even at all, into any preconceived notion of what prose fiction should read like, or effect in the reader. Ridge’s novella-length work is something more like a Lonely Planet travel guide, or the recovered fragments of some distant, arcane encyclopedia. But even Ridge isn’t quite sure what it is. It just is. American Homes. It starts at Part III and moves through a prose-schematic of domestic spaces: walls, windows, attics, blinds, roofs, porches, chimneys, doors. American Homesoffers ontological conundra (“A Door is not a Door when Ajar.”) It offers sage statistical insights (the Front Door “…accumulates more Annual Knuckle Precipitation than both the Back Door and Side Door combined.”) It offers its own literary criticism, of itself (“The Porch Swing is a Post-Cynical literary device… It is also the symbol of freedom in t