Full Reviews

Kirkus Review
Frontiers Magazine

Kirkus Review:
The House Beautiful
October 15, 2006

The Greenwich Village demimonde never seemed so demented. B.K. Troop can’t stop dreaming. Boatloads of Austrian pinot noir that he downs virtually before lunch help keep the fantasy alive, but mainly he’s just high on life—the literary life, that is, starring B.K. Troop. Burnett (Christopher, 2003) creates in this wreck of a faux novelist a memorable comic lead. Right before electro-convulsive therapy fells her, Sasha Buchwitz, Troop’s dearest pal and muse, leaves him her brownstone, but he’s stone broke. Solution? Rent out the heap as an artists’colony. Here they come: filmmakers with coke habits, experimental painters favoring gynecological themes, addled lesbian folk singers. But of all his guests, Troop fawns fiercest over a greenhorn from the bland Midwest, Adrian Malloy, “the spitting image,” Troop chirps, “of Johnny Keats, my favorite Romantic poet.” Problem One: Troop’s already spoken for, by Pip, the gnomic Vietnamese with the mysterious violent past.  Problem Two: Adrian’s not really a poet. Instead, fleeing the cornfields after his father’s death, he’s arrived with a trash bag stuffed with dad’s physics theories. Discovering his dead dad was perhaps a closet genius, Adrian grieves and moons and whimpers, but hardly notices Troop, who, between fantasizing about George Meredith and Bulwer-Lytton, spends most of his time trying to make Adrian the fly to his spider. Why not scheme? After all, he quips, “ethics are a luxury of the secure.” The plot here is dandy, mainly along the lines of speed-freak French farce. But the true joy is Troop’s champagne-giddy language and his besotted love for his houseful of bohemians.

Armistead Maupin on laughing gas.

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL: A Novel of High Ideals, Low Morals, and Lower Rent Carroll & Graf/Avalon (256pp.) $14.95 paperback original Nov. 5, 2006 ISBN: 0-7867-1759-9

Frontiers Magazine

The House Beautiful
Allison Burnett
(Carroll & Graf, $14.95, paperback)
*** 1/2 Stars
In this entertaining novel, which reads like a mash-up of A Confederacy of Dunces and Catch-22, B. K. Troop—the hilariously repulsive, alcoholic, bipolar “homosexualist” narrator of Burnett’s first novel, Christopher—opens his newly-inherited NYC brownstone as an artist’s colony. Among his lodgers are a manic novelist who lives in the closet, a lesbian singer-songwriter, a nihilist-philosopher-cum-writer, and a young man Troop swears is the second coming of John Keats. This setup spreads nicely into a mosaic of stories overlapping in time and space, rather than an overarching plot. There is a narrative and temporal coherence that leads the book from beginning to end, but it’s not the strictly linear development of an A-plot. In the end, The House Beautiful is something of a Romantic paean to the powers of love and art; it’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s tidy, earnest, and enormously satisfying—and Troop is the kind of creation careers are made on. —JEFF MATTHEWS