In the early hours of June 14, 2017, the world watches as flames leap up the sides of a residential high-rise in West London, consuming Grenfell Tower and many of the lives within it. Across town, an earlier spark has caught fire. A cigarette left burning in an ashtray. A table strewn with post-it reminders and old newspapers. And one Cornelius Winston Pitt—estranged husband, complicated dad, and Pitt family patriarch—takes his final breaths alone.
These twin tragedies open A House for Alice, a portrait of a family of women shaken by loss and searching for closure.
This is a realist novel and a novel about ghosts; an immigrant novel about what it means to return home; a novel of women that may actually be a novel about men ... Each character here is richly and deeply drawn, with histories and personalities so fully realized that it’s a pleasure to get to know them ... Evans’s writing stuns, showcasing a flair that turns even dying into poetry ... The most brilliant element of the novel comes at the close of the book, where the story ends, and then ends again. I won’t spoil it by revealing more.
The novel is a collection of characters and incidents that only barely relate to one another, much like the two fires reported in its opening pages. No event — past or impending — or person or setting can lay claim to the novel’s center of gravity, a multiplicity with potential that, as executed, resembles inattention ... Ambitious but suffers from disinterest in its own moving parts, including the tides of recent history within which it is conspicuously placed.
Enticing ... The narrative expands outwards; it whirls into the lives and perspectives of adjacent characters, sometimes lending the novel the feel of a collection of linked short stories ... Evans records the interiorities of her characters and their lives with acutely realistic detail. Realism, of course, doesn’t mean dullness ... There is sometimes so much detail and rich depth that our eponymous protagonist vanishes ... Sweeping ... Generous.
