All the Houses: A Novel

by Karen Olsson

Overview

After her father’s heart attack and subsequent surgery, Helen Atherton returns to her hometown of Washington, D.C., to help take care of him and, perhaps more honestly, herself. She’s been living in Los Angeles, trying to work in Hollywood, slowly spiraling into a depression fueled by hours spent watching C-SPAN—-her obsession with politics a holdover from a childhood interrupted by her father’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.

The rest of the world might have forgotten it, but the Atherton family never quite recovered. With sharp, witty, and suspenseful prose, All the Houses reveals their story, as Helen pieces together the political moves that pulled her family apart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250097439
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Karen Olsson is the author of the novel Waterloo. She has written about politics, science, and popular culture for magazines, including The New York Times Magazine and Texas Monthly, where she is a contributing editor. She is also a former editor of The Texas Observer. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., she now lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

Editorial Reviews

For readers anywhere, All the Houses offers a rich exploration of the stubborn strangeness of parents and siblings, but for Washingtonians, the book also provides the uncanny pleasure of seeing our town’s mores examined with precision and sensitivity . . . With its wry humor and gentle insights into the way we draw away from one another at exactly the wrong time, All the Houses is more than just an illuminating story about the nameless victims of political scandal. It’s a story about how our insecurities encourage us to smother our affections — and a reminder that we’re running out of time to make amends. —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"In [All the Houses] Olsson never overplays her hand — while there's plenty of emotional tension, she never succumbs to melodrama; every character is remarkably real . . . All the Houses isn't really about Iran-Contra; it's about a family trying to piece itself together after being broken in a public way. Olsson handles her subjects gently; she's not afraid to show her characters' flaws, but she treats them all with a real sense of sympathy. And she writes with a clear eye that's free from sentimental nostalgia, even though nostalgia is, in a way, a central subject of the book."—Michael Schaub, NPR

“Karen Olsson's All the Houses is as grand as it is intimate-an exquisite, precisely layered, and somehow almost magically suspenseful portrait of a family, a city, and a political culture that's impossible to tear away from.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

“A patriarch's health falters. A lost daughter returns, stepping back into the long shadow of political scandal that has eroded her family. This is the stage Karen Olsson sets in her magnificent second novel, and she explores questions of loyalty and culpability, of secrecy and identity, with delicious complexity and knife-sharp humor. All the Houses is a stunning portrait of a family forced to reckon with their public legacy and, most of all, their private selves.” —Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me

“Written with wry humor, penetrating insight, and big-hearted sincerity, Karen Olsson's All the Houses is a wise, contemplative book about the stories that shape a childhood, the traumas that shape a family, and the politics that shape a nation. But it is also something much more: the extremely rare kind of novel whose characters are so true-so richly drawn, subtly nuanced, and intimately observed-that you start to feel that it isn't a book you are holding in your hands. It's a living thing.” —Stefan Merrill Block, author of The Story of Forgetting and The Storm at the Door

"Politics and family may make strange bedfellows, but in the knowing and amusing novel All the Houses, Olsson makes them inseparable. Add another name alongside those writers who have so effectively made Washington a literary landscape." —Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness

"In today's world of 15 minutes of fame, Olsson (Waterloo) illustrates how the public may forget history, but, nearly 20 years later, the fallout of a political disgrace continues to affect families. The strength of Olsson's novel is her subtle unveiling of a small circle of Washington fathers whose long hours working behind closed doors impact their wives, children, and themselves." —Library Journal

From the Publisher

Written with wry humor, penetrating insight, and big-hearted sincerity, Karen Olsson's All the Houses is a wise, contemplative book about the stories that shape a childhood, the traumas that shape a family, and the politics that shape a nation. But it is also something much more: the extremely rare kind of novel whose characters are so true-so richly drawn, subtly nuanced, and intimately observed-that you start to feel that it isn't a book you are holding in your hands. It's a living thing.

author of The Story of Forgetting and The Storm at Stefan Merrill Block

10/15/2015
In November 2004, 34-year-old Helen Atherton, a struggling writer and political news junkie, returns to Washington, DC, from Pasadena to care for her divorced father, Tim, who is recovering from heart surgery. Eighteen years earlier, in 1986, he was under federal investigation for his role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Helen plunges into her father's history with plans to write his story, hoping to document how her young father was full of potential and good intentions when he landed his job at the National Security Council. Instead, she discovers the details of her family's unraveling. Helen's return home allows her to get reacquainted with her two sisters and their high school friends, who provide details that went unnoticed by Helen during the crisis. VERDICT In today's world of 15 minutes of fame, Olsson (Waterloo) illustrates how the public may forget history, but, nearly 20 years later, the fallout of a political disgrace continues to affect families. The strength of Olsson's novel is her subtle unveiling of a small circle of Washington fathers whose long hours working behind closed doors impact their wives, children, and themselves.—Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL

Library Journal

2015-08-17
A rich moment in political history is distilled through its long-term impact on a disjointed Washington family. It takes only a few sentences for the second novel from Olsson (Waterloo, 2005) to divulge its author's roots as a reporter. Despite her Hollywood screenwriting aspirations, Helen Atherton narrates with the granular detail and on-the-fly analysis of a journalist born and bred in D.C., as Olsson was. Helen's story is set partially against the backdrop of the Iran-Contra hearings, which ruined the career of her father, Tim, a midlevel player in the Reagan administration. When she moves home to help care for Tim after his heart attack almost 20 years later, Helen slips back into the familiar struggles of a black sheep and middle child. Olsson captures some sweet moments of reconnection as dad and daughter tiptoe around each other, but the more complicated and compelling relationship stews between Helen and her sister Courtney, a high school superstar who eclipsed her younger siblings until she fell off the rails senior year. Courtney's tale of woe crisscrosses with Tim's and several B plots centered on slimy guys (the Atherton women share a taste for them, if little else): most crucially the late Dick Mitchell, a friend and colleague of Tim's, who behaved worse but fared better in Iran-Contra; and his stepson, Rob Golden, a former drug dealer who seduces both Helen and Courtney with his good looks and indifference. "In my family we hardly ever recalled our past to each other," Helen notes. "We compartmentalized." Olsson does the opposite in this affecting but tangled book, which takes long enough to sort itself out that it may lose you in the process. Family politics as usual, if they're usually a mess.

Kirkus Reviews