GUTTED

A Dumpster’s worth of grief and sarcasm, beveled by a strong dose of humor, accompanies this home-renovation tale from hell.

It’s Long Island’s East End, the land of swank, where LaRose (The Code, not reviewed) and his wife have just bought a fixer-upper. The couple’s bank balance does not place them among the fabulously wealthy; in fact, they’re not even solvent, as LaRose has just lost his job, and his wife works for a nonprofit organization. This adds a pleasing reality check to the proceedings, since they can’t simply throw bottomless gobs of capital into “the innumerable charms of this small cape. Innumerable because there are none.” The house is not just a fixer-upper; it’s a dump—or, in LaRose's decorous language, a “shit heap.” It requires not so much renovation as demolition, and so the wrecking starts, both of the house and of the marriage. The newly unemployed homeowner decides to merge his dual needs, acquiring a paying job and the promise of construction know-how simultaneously when he fakes his way into employment with the area’s contractors, who are desperate for manpower. LaRose works hard to keep the reader’s funny bone tickled, sometimes going too far with the “cat puke” Formica and “kiddy-porn grade wood paneling.” Mostly, however, he deftly nails the absurdities both of working on the house (“Home Depot will show you in 4,000 cavernous aisles just how unalterably Other your significant other really is”) and of learning a trade on the fly (at one point he puts a circular power saw down, “forgetting that blade guard is jammed open. Its teeth dig into the plywood flooring, and the saw tears around my feet like a scorpion”). Yet he hangs in like a hero out of Kafka.

The word “fiasco” doesn’t begin to meet the specs, but you have to admire LaRose for admitting it all.