University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Strange Houses A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2006 by Joseph Alex DeBonis B.A. Indiana University, 1996 M.A. Illinois State University, 2001 Committee Chair: Professor Michael Griffith Joseph Alex DeBonis Dissertation Abstract This dissertation, Strange Houses, is a collection of original short stories by the author, Joseph Alex DeBonis. The stories engage notions about home, family, estrangement, and alienation. Since many of the stories deal with family and marital relations, homes feature prominently in the action and as settings. Often characters are estranged or exiled, and their obsessions with having normal families and/or stable lives drive them to construct elaborate fantasies in which they are included, loved, and part of something enduring that is larger than themselves. The dissertation also includes a critical paper, “A Butterfly, a Cannonball, and a Sneeze: Notions of Chaos Theory in Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” In this essay, I argue that the novel All The Pretty Horses grapples with a sense of freedom that is rife with ambiguity and demonstrates McCarthy’s engagement with chaos theory. The essay shows how Thomas Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, exhibits similar concerns with the dynamic interaction of order and disorder. Though Horses has realistic details and does not appear to engage chaos theory in as obvious a way as The Crying of Lot 49 does, McCarthy’s novel can be profitably read through the lens of chaos theory. Acknowledgments I’d like give my endless thanks to my parents, Joe and Jewell DeBonis, without whose support I could not have completed the following. Thanks to Michael Griffith, Brock Clarke, and Jim Schiff for their fine teaching, reading, and support. Thanks Jonathan Alexander and John Drury for being great, involved instructors. Thanks to my colleagues Darrin Doyle, Jody Bates, Marsha Foster, and Kelcey Parker, without whom the following would have suffered. Thanks to Lauren Mosko, Rachel Zlatkin, Phoebe Reeves, Julie Gerk-Hernandez, Steve Criniti, Sarah Domet, Bob Murdock, Kirk Boyle, and Sarah Perrier for their friendship. I’d also like to thank the Taft Fund for their financial support. Of course, my biggest thanks go to my wife, Loraine, for her love, patience and perseverance in the face of much uncertainty and ugliness. TABLE OF CONTENTS Prospectus: Creative Portion………………………………………………………………2 Prospectus: Critical Portion…………………………………………………………….....8 Housesitting……………………………………………………………………………...10 A Place To Sleep…………………………………………………………………………28 Where The Day Takes You………………………………………………………………59 Mike’s House…………………………………………………………………………….77 The National Housewives’ Toilet Fund……………………………………………….....98 The Killing Kind………………………………………………………………………..120 Donkey Basketball……………………………………………………………………...147 Nomads…………………………………………………………………………………164 Cutting Season………………………………………………………………………….190 A Butterfly, a Cannonball, and a Sneeze: Notions of Chaos Theory in Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49……..216 Prospectus: Creative Portion It’s all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That’s where folks live. But it’s another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there. —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love Strange Houses is a collection of thematically linked short stories, each engaging notions about home, family, estrangement, and alienation. Since many of the stories deal with family and marital relations, homes feature prominently in the action and as settings. Often characters are estranged or exiled, and their obsessions with having normal families and/or stable lives drive them to construct elaborate fantasies in which they are included, loved, and part of something enduring that is larger than themselves. The house is the literal and figurative container for our society’s basic tribal unit, the family. Many characters have clear—sometimes reasonable, sometimes not—expectations of what a family should be, how it ought to act, whom it should include, and what part they play in it. Some houses in the collection act like beacons that characters are tracking, others are temples the characters try to maintain, and others are cages of loneliness or despair. For four of the stories, the strange houses are literal and serve as settings. In “Housesitting,” a floundering young painter tries to resuscitate his failing marriage by attempting to reconnect with his stressed-out wife, who uses housesitting duties for her boss as an excuse pull away. The narrator tries a couple of desperate, ill-conceived ploys to remake himself and halt his marriage’s dissolution, but his efforts only repel his wife further. The setting comes to represent the narrator’s alienation as he fantasizes about the owners’ apparently terrific relationship and reflects on his marriage’s demise. 2 In “Mike’s House,” eleven-year-old Virgil is enlisted by Keith, his mother’s crass boyfriend, to help loot a house recently vacated by Virgil’s best friend and his parents, who served as Virgil’s surrogate family. The boy’s reluctance to help remove the basement carpet and his guilt at being party to the defiling of his friend’s house pit him against Keith. Though he’s long given up on the capability of his own family to sustain him, as the story goes on he softens toward the hapless, more-or-less well-meaning Keith; Virgil eventually tries to save this hoodlum, who is threatened with jail over the theft, and comes to see his mother’s boyfriend is part of the only family he has left. “A Place To Sleep” also employs an unfamiliar home as a setting. The paraplegic narrator—a disgraced inventor named Melanie—is forced by financial necessity and her handicap to move into a cramped apartment with her brother Ned and his family. The problem is that Melanie has to bring along her invention—the last working prototype of a coma chamber, with occupant—because she feels responsible for the fate of Andrew (whom she put in a voluntary coma a few years before) and has nowhere else to keep him. Caring for Andrew has made him a son to her, and she brings the coma chamber into her brother’s living room, displacing furniture and disrupting his ordinary family life. As her supply of sedatives diminishes, she is forced to resort to a crime that ends disastrously. The narrator continually exploits the guilt of her brother, whom was party to the injury that handicapped her as a child, to keep Andrew’s chamber operating. This story is, in one way, about how guilt can serve as a precarious but palpable kind of familial bond—responsibility. Though Melanie strains her relationship with Ned, it holds, but he can’t absolve her of the guilt she feels for asking so much of him. 3 “Where The Day Takes You” is the story of a devoted company man whose mysterious corporation appears to be falling apart around him. In an attempt to hunt down his reclusive boss, he resorts to a weird game of chance played with a car and a coin. The narrator winds up at a nondescript suburban house where he encounters an unusual family arrangement. Herbert Mooney and his son are building ruthlessly efficient selling machines in their garage, and their subterfuge leads the narrator to question the ethics of his job as a salesman. The ugly, lie-ridden side of selling and capitalism literally enters the home of Mooney and son, and the narrator sees the fraud he’s been perpetrating being born right there. In the collection’s second vein of stories, the narratives involve metaphorical strange houses. Once familiar homes become strange, and imagined homes become repositories for obsessions and fears. Characters resort to self-destruction, mischief, and hopelessness when reality does not conform to their hyperdeveloped expectations. “The National Housewives’ Toilet Fund” is the story of Karen, a young woman who discovers $5,000 and a mysterious note in her commode. The note claims the bagged and bundled money is a gift from the National Housewives, and she believes it is meant to help her and her boyfriend, Rob, buy a house. Yet she’s deeply uncomfortable at being identified as a housewife, a role she pledged to her feminist friend Lindsay to avoid at all costs. She suspects that Rob plans to propose to her and fears that he might, wittingly or unwittingly, want her to conform to the housewife mold. Might accepting the money and Rob’s imminent proposal mean the same thing, that she is being co-opted by an institution that makes women subservient to men? In a scene that takes place at Lindsay’s graduation costume party—theme “Figures of Dogmatic Oppression”— 4 Lindsay’s derision and wholesale rejection of marriage prompt her to decide what she wants for herself. While “Housewives” engages these issues and expectations somewhat comically, “Nomads” is more downbeat. To earn a living, eighteen-year-old Tammy accepts her father’s carnival food-booth in exchange for his taking primary custody of her infant daughter, Jo. Thirteen years later, Tammy is still struggling to make enough to pay her debts and bring her daughter to live with her. In an attempt to maintain a relationship with Jo, Tammy invites her to travel with her for a summer and work the booth at fairs and expos. Her daughter’s wayward father, a one-time drug dealer, surfaces at a town festival when Tammy is least able to thwart his claims on Jo.

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