'House Mother Normal' by B.S. Johnson

Eight residents and then their house mother each deliver a 21-page interior monologue (with snippets of direct speech) revealing their thoughts during the same evening of activities at their rest home. Johnson has cleverly structured the novel so that the narratives can be compared page-to-page and a sequence of events can be constructed by cross-reference. Each character is introduced with a table rating the degree of incapacity of their various faculties, which is then reflected in the monologues (these become less coherent as the book progresses through decreasingly compos mentis residents). By providing internal access to each person present, Johnson provides a multidimensional narrative, a sort of compound claustrophobia, in which he explores the relationship between memory and identity, the gradual reduction of mental life to the desperate subjective affirmation of banality (though he is democratic enough to grant all meaning equivalent status), the persistence or otherwise of personhood through incapacity, and the shaky concept of ‘the normal’ (at one point the house mother says, “I disgust them in order that they may not be disgusted with themselves”). House Mother Normal is a remarkably approachable experiment, in turns excoriating, compassionate and funny.

Sept 2013