cover image Dream House: A Memoir

Dream House: A Memoir

Charlotte Nekola. W. W. Norton & Company, $18.95 (175pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03433-2

With courage and lyricism, Nekola probes behind the happy facade of her 1950s family. The meditative vignettes form a poignant mosaic, though Nekola--now a poet and professor at William Paterson College in New Jersey--puts off describing herself for too long. The author's college-educated mother never wrote the book she wanted to; instead she compiled recipes with commentary in which ``she kept a running conversation with herself about success and failure.'' Still, the author believes her mother briefly subverted the prevailing ethos to nudge her daughter to independence. Her father, denied a college education by the Depression, was nothing like the ``TV fantasy of physically available, emotionally tuned-in fathers in the 1950s.'' Her sister, following a rollercoaster ride of manic depression, petty crime and rootlessness, died young and caused Nekola to observe that ``none of this holding on . . . guarantees anything at all.'' Trying to introduce some reliability into the wounded lives of her niece and nephew, Nekola muses, ``I want to be that solid thing that I cannot be quite yet.'' Through her prose, she has begun that reconstruction. (Jan.)