In “A House for Alice,” Cornelius Pitt’s death forces his family to contend with all manner of human messes.
These characters include Cornelius Pitt’s widow — the titular Alice, from whom he was separated — and their three daughters, Melissa, Carol and Adel, along with their families and friends. In the wake of Cornelius’s death, Alice renews a dormant wish of returning to her homeland, where, as far as she knows, a house awaits. Once upon a time, Alice left Nigeria to become a Pitt in the U.K. Yet she “had never been fully reborn or reconfigured as the immigrant must be in order to thrive.
But “A House for Alice” is not about Alice. Nor is it about her daughters, each with her own notion about Alice’s leave-taking as it corresponds with unresolved grievances. In truth, 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.
“A House for Alice” is ambitious but suffers from disinterest in its own moving parts, including the tides of recent history within which it is conspicuously placed. Fans of “Ordinary People” may be intrigued to know what happens next to familiar names, but they will have to be content to hear of their stories rather than witness them.
Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English and Black studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of “White Negroes.”
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