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Home Is Where The Questions Linger On

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By GEETA SHARMA-JENSEN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 15, 2009

Valerie Laken was taking graduate courses in Slavic literature in Ann Arbor, Mich., when she persuaded her husband to buy a fixer-upper in a neighborhood just beginning to gentrify. They were working on the house soon after they moved in when an old man across the street came by. So, he said, you know the history of this place, right? When Laken said no, the man proceeded to tell them.

And that became the inspiration, the nucleus of Laken's first novel, "Dream House," out this month.

Seven years in the writing, the novel explores the meaning of a home in American life, spinning out into wider themes of bad and good, race and class, family and the conflicts within. At the core of this haunting fiction is a long-ago murder that eats away at the young marriage of the house's present-day owners.

Fiction and fact met somewhere for Laken in 1996 after their neighbor stopped over.

"We thought he'd tell us a good history, like the mayor had lived there in our house," remembers Laken, who now teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "And he said, no, there was a murder here in our house and he didn't know what had happened really. We were imagining bullet holes and blood on the carpet. Then a month later another neighbor told us a complete version, and I found it to be a moving story ... a noble story, a really inspiring story. And the seed planted itself in my brain. I began trying to figure out how it would have affected everybody. Just as a process of trying to understand my house better, I started to write about it, and gradually it started to evolve into this novel."

Laken, who was born and raised in Rockford, Ill., where her father owned a mobile home park, had been writing since childhood. But the story of the house made her a serious writer who went on to get an MFA in fiction and then win two Hopwood Awards as well as a Pushcart Prize for her stories and a screenplay.
Laken has an easy way of telling a story, with a prose that peels off the page fluidly.

"Her house was growing walls," she writes at one point about Kate Kinzler, the character who, like Laken, buys a fixer-upper with her husband. "It was like watching a rotten skeleton grow muscles, then skin, then turn into a human being, and walk."
Laken says she was interested in showing how one house could mean such different things to different people. So, for the young Kinzlers their new house means a home in which to rekindle their troubled marriage. To the killer released from prison, that same house is not only the scene of his most terrible act but also the scene of his childhood, his happy memories, a time of his goodness and his honor.

"I was very interested in the ways our homes define us and frustrate us and can defy our best wishes," Laken explained. "The truth is nobody's house is a dream house. Everybody's house can be many things; it can be a nurturing place but also a damaging place."

Geeta Sharma-Jensen is a writer for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

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