Ryan Ridge, “American Homes” (University of Michigan Press, 2014)

New Books in Literature · Sep 13, 2015 · 25m

Ryan Ridge‘s American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is at odds with category: it doesn’t really fit neatly, or even at all, into any preconceived notion of what prose fiction should read like, or effect in the reader. Ridge’s novella-length work is something more like a Lonely Planet travel guide, or the recovered fragments of some distant, arcane encyclopedia. But even Ridge isn’t quite sure what it is. It just is. American Homes. It starts at Part III and moves through a prose-schematic of domestic spaces: walls, windows, attics, blinds, roofs, porches, chimneys, doors…