PositiveThe RumpusIntersecting fabulist mythology and domestic realism, Bell takes as familiar a theme as a couple escaping the confines of civic life and turns this paradigm into a constantly shifting platform on which nothing is ever firmly on its feet ... Isolation allows the artist to use a default setting: man, wife, tools. Uncovering every surface of this constriction Bell carves from one piece of wood a thousand faces ... It is meticulous, but it is not a tactical novel. If you remove a piece it would fall like its eponymous house into the ground It has the subtle mark of a feeling construction, a felt design ... Trying to sum up compactly what it all means leads me back to the starting-line of the novel: Undeliverable. Read Matt Bell’s new novel eavesdropping intently and what you will hear draws you closer and closer to the door.
