Book(s) Review: Semi-Detached by Three Writers

One title, three very different stories

Real estate, the age-old obsession. It’s an ideal subject for writers, and one I think is under-utilized. Because, of course, houses are as concrete as you can get, but also thoroughly symbolic. They’re not just about shelter, but class and status. Where can you afford to live? What will you aspire to or settle for? What happens if you can’t find a home, either literal or symbolic? It’s a question of envy, acquisitiveness, self-assertion, comfort and loss—and how all these things play out in the relationships taking place under roofs that sometimes provide no shelter at all.

In her latest novel, Semi-Detached, writer Elizabeth Ruth puts housing at the centre of her story. Her protagonist, Laura, is a real estate agent living comfortably in east end Toronto with her wife Cat—Catalina—who is originally from Argentina. Laura has been charged with selling a small house on Condor Avenue, a real street only a few blocks from where I live. But the house is a fictional construct, the property of a woman lying in hospital in an irreversible coma who is so far behind on her taxes that the place has been seized by the city. It’s being sold to pay off the woman’s debts. 

As she approaches the empty house during Toronto’s epic snowstorm of 2013, Laura is accosted by an apparently unhoused girl named Astrid who wants to shelter inside. Laura is sympathetic but frightened, and shuts Astrid out of the house. Inside, Laura finds a sort of domestic museum, an interior unchanged since the 1940s, a cheap old tea service set out ready for use. The scene affects her oddly, and the story begins to flip back and forth between Laura in 2013 and the story of the woman in the coma, Edna, when she was young during the Second World War. 

Laura can sense the past around her. But then, she’s in a liminal place. Laura might or might not be pregnant, having just undergone a Hail Mary round of IVF, still trying to have a child after several miscarriages and tens of thousands of dollars in treatment. And here’s a further complication. Laura’s wife Cat doesn’t know that Laura has had another fertilized egg implanted. Nor does she want to keep trying to get pregnant. Cat is ready to accept a childless future, and at first she's adamant about that.

Reading Elizabeth Ruth’s book brought me back to another novel of the same name published twenty-five years ago: Semi-Detached by Cynthia Holz. You can’t copyright titles, so there are more than a few repeats out there. In fact, I also pulled The Semi-Detached House by British writer Emily Eden off my bookshelves, this one published in 1859. But that makes it fun to compare and contrast. What brings writers to the same title? What do they have to say about both society and relationships, which from the title onward they’re telling us are only semi-working attachments? Can the couples we meet survive?

Get ELizabeth Ruth’s novel here.

Cynthia Holz’s novel is also set in Toronto, although the city isn’t as explicitly delineated as it is in Elizabeth Ruth’s book. Holz’s novel is centred on a long-term relationship in which the wife and husband still love one another but have fallen into a rut. While Holz is writing about a specific couple, by choosing to universalize the setting, she’s also inviting readers to generalize about couples everywhere—and perhaps about themselves. Ruth’s novel is more particular, with its named streets, explicit dates, IVF and the tight Toronto housing market, along with a past of World War Two-era brickworks and queer nightclubs. I read it as an examination of individuals coping with specific historical stressors that can tear love apart. Two approaches, same title.

In Cynthia Holz’s novel, we learn on the opening page that after thirty-two years of marriage, Barbara Rifkin and her husband Elliot are dividing their house into two apartments with—importantly—locks between them. Barbara gets the main floor and semi-furnished basement while Elliot gets the two upper stories. Both are in their fifties and recently retired, Barbara as a teacher and Elliot from his dental practice. Once the house is divided and she has more time at her disposal, Barbara starts throwing pots, taking classes and turning the basement into her pottery studio. She’s reinventing herself and wants Elliot to do the same.

The Rifkins’ grown children are horrified by their semi-split, their friends puzzled, and Barbara’s mother hilariously cynical about the decision, which is clearly Barbara’s decision. Barbara loves Elliot but she’s bored with him, and she’s right: Elliot is a bit of a schlub, prone to following her around the house reading out stories from the Globe & Mail, leaving her to do all the cooking, and meanwhile lying on the couch for hours doing a particularly teeth-clenching form of nothing. Elliot is also a touching character who wants to stay with his wife, the only woman he’s ever loved. He’s a fond grandfather, a guy with no idea how to enjoy his retirement, a man who’s obviously lost, vulnerable and—as Barbara’s mother Dora points out—easy prey for other women. 

Yet the question Holz implicitly asks is not whether Elliot is going to find another relationship, but whether he can change, or indeed if he wants to. As a man, Elliot has romantic choices denied the fifty-something Barbara. He’s perfectly capable of landing on a series of women and driving them all crazy, following them around reading out stories from the Globe & Mail, lying on the couch, longing for his former life and the woman who is still legally his wife. Can Elliot grow, find a new richness in life, write himself a second act—and perhaps get back together with Barbara the way he insists he wants? And what will be Barbara's reaction?

Both novels segue into other relationships. In Holz’s book, the Rifkins’ grown children are important characters. Their son is in love with his busy doctor wife, while the wife often thinks about the time when their children are grown and she’ll be able to leave him. Meanwhile, their daughter Susan is a single mother with terrible taste in men, a strident woman who is touchingly hopeful, repeatedly disappointed, and cherishes a list of grievances against both the world and her parents. Still, Susan keeps trying to get Barbara and Elliot back together, hoping that love can prevail. At its heart, the book is about love and change, and whether we can change enough throughout our lives to nourish long and loving partnerships, or whether some of us change too much. The novel wonders whether the best we can hope for as couples is to be semi-detached. And whether, in the end, that’s so bad.

In Ruth’s busier novel, the book spends an increasing amount of time in the past. Some of it follows Laura’s mother, a performance artist with performative friends. Much of it takes place when Edna was young during the 1940s. Edna is queer and her story takes us into the lesbian community of the time, from its all-woman bowling league to the nightclubs where lesbians could go for a drink, a flirt and a dance. There’s also a romance. Edna falls in love with Annie, the daughter of the man who owns the brickyard where they both work. Annie is brought up in an abusive and conventional household, but she’s an adventurous young woman, curious and brave, and she falls for Edna, too. Having an affair is an enormous risk for both of them, especially when a historic snowstorm blows in, paralyzing the city the way a future storm will shut things down in 2013. Like houses, storms can be symbolically weighted, and in both timelines, they rage.

Elizabeth Ruth has done admirably meticulous research into Toronto’s past, especially the past of the city’s lesbian community. If I have one small criticism of the book, it’s that the writing can feel too careful, especially with WWII-era dialogue that sometimes sounds self-conscious, relying too heavily on researched slang. Hilary Mantel’s series of Cromwell novels set in the 16^th century provide a wonderful model for writing historical dialogue, with Mantel suggesting a very different time period through the cadence of a character’s speech rather than the over-use of forsooth and verily. 

However, as Ruth’s Semi-Detached heads toward its climax, the writing becomes looser and more propulsive. Also surprising, as modern-day Laura lets down her guard with the unhoused young Astrid, and touches realms she had never imagined. The book offers a little mysticism toward the end, a shake of pixie dust, and a well-earned sense of the past and present being interconnected. The knowledge doesn’t change Laura—I don’t think Ruth’s novel is as much about change as Holz’s—but it helps her become more herself. After all, real estate agents are charged with pleasing other people, helping them find what they want and figuring out how they can get it. Laura is very much an agent, which becomes explicit in her final dealings with Astrid. It’s also true that relationships often involve a degree of bowing to a partner’s wishes. When Laura decides not to, her story takes a moving turn.

You can order Holz’s Semi-Detached here.

Contrast and compare. In a sense, Ruth’s Semi-Detached is about self-actualization, a modern theme that implies great difficulty in maintaining relationships over the long haul. Expressing yourself is a key part of Cynthia Holz’s novel as well, but at the end of her 1999 novel, a greater sense of optimism prevails. I wonder if that says something about the times in which the books were written. There used to be more hope. Now the modern world is atomizing, and relationships are splintering along with it.

Then there’s Emily Eden’s The Semi-Detached House from 1859. My copy is an old, used Virago Modern Classics edition, published in 1982 as a two-fer with Eden’s other novel, The Semi-Attached Couple. I’m not sure why Virago chose to bring it back into wide circulation. The book is appallingly antisemitic, its villains a Jewish family called the Sampsons who are said to know the Rothschilds, which is a way of saying “of course, these aren’t the Rothschilds” while simultaneously implying that they are—at least, Emily Eden’s idea of them.

The Hon. Emily was an aristocrat, the daughter of one Lord Auckland and sister of the next. Her brother was Governor General of India from 1835 to 1842, and she went there with him, although her references to other cultures in her Semi-Detached show no great insight, with racist references a ship “nearly running aground off the island of Tattyminibo, having mistaken it for the port of Tammyhominy” and so on.

In Eden’s novel, the semi-detached house is more literal-minded, centring on a big residence with a smaller house tacked onto the side. A young aristocratic woman moves into the big house while her husband is abroad. A “deserving” middle-class family lives on the other side, the wife and daughters of a merchant captain who is away at sea for most of the book. It’s amusing enough as the noblesse-obliging aristocrats arrange the marriages and prosperity of the worthy young daughters of the bluff captain, and a happy anchorage for their father when he returns. 

Yet in contrast to the upbeat main story, the Jewish characters in the sub-plot are meanly portrayed as vulgar parvenues, insidious and rapacious. A party thrown by the Baroness Sampson “looked like a recovery of one of the lost tribes of Israel.” In the end, the paterfamilias steals a great deal of money before he and his wife do a flit to the continent. They leave behind a kind and principled niece, a damaged young woman who perhaps represents Emily Eden’s defense: I don’t dislike all Jews. Yet she can’t help punishing poor Rachel for being Jewish by making her so cold she can’t feel romantic love. The novel is an easy read while being very hard to read at the same time.

So why do I bring it up? Once again: compare and contrast. In Cynthia Holz’s novel, the Rifkins are Jewish, though not particularly religious, and by 1999 a Jewish family can be both offered and accepted as Every Family. In Ruth’s Semi-Detached, the couples are lesbian, and while rampant homophobia is portrayed in the chapters set in the 1940s, by 2013 Laura and Cat are simply written as married, no fuss. Taking the long view when reading all three books, it’s possible to feel hopeful while tracing the progress from widespread antisemitism, racism and homophobia toward a greater acceptance of people’s individual differences and overall humanity—at least as long as the two recent Semi-Detacheds don’t start feeling too much like quaint period pieces as well, the acceptance they imply dissipating as society retreats toward The Hon. Emily Eden's decidedly non-edenic past. 

My latest novel is Far Creek Road, and it doesn’t have a doppleganger that I know of. You can order it here.