HIS GRANDFATHER'S HOUSE

Fritsch (Elizabeth Daleiden on Trial, 2016, etc.) unfurls a tortured familial epic set in an Illinois farming community.

Henry, the titular grandfather and patriarch of the Reinhart family, has a long, infamous history in the rural farming community where his father settled in the previous century. Henry’s brazen, lifelong ambition to take over every farm on the section of land where he was born, and to “never again have to share a fence with another human being,” makes members of the community—and his own family—suspect him of many crimes, including the murder of his own brother. His steadfast refusal to attend the local church and his continued acquisition of his neighbors’ farms by various, sometimes-dubious means doesn’t help his case. By the time he comes to care for his only grandson, Kurt Reinhart, in one of the houses on his land in 1947, he and his clan are seen as pariahs. Kurt lives and works alongside his stubborn but surprisingly open-minded grandfather; later, he investigates the violent rumors about his birthright while also coming to terms with his own homosexuality and the sexual repression in his family. Fritsch will still maintain readers’ interest with his sheer storytelling verve, as he brings vivid specificity to his fully imagined world. His folksy, easygoing style belies the painful secrets and violence at the heart of the novel and renders the bloodstained and tragic narrative much lighter and easier to read than it has any right to be. However, the ambitious tale occasionally gets muddled amid the minutiae of Reinhart family’s history and an exhausting cavalcade of thinly drawn secondary characters. The dialogue is also often tin-eared and exposition-heavy, and none of the characters speaks in a way that’s dissimilar to the narrator.

A confident, if occasionally exhausting, familial and historical epic, coupled with a tender bildungsroman.