We, the House: a novel

We, the House begins in 1878 in a frontier town on the Kansas prairie where a batteredCivil War Union veteran builds his new wife her dream house, an Italianate glory shenames Ambleside who tells this story. Soon an early American portrait of Mrs. SimonPeale arrives from Hartford, Connecticut to dignify the dining room wall. When theportrait’s existential yelp causes house and painting to discover each other, Ambleside isa perfect ‘tabula rasa,’ almost literally born yesterday, and Mrs. Peale is a devastated young widow, a starchy professor of Latin, who has been dead since 1841. Together, through the lives and generations of ‘their’ family, the two works of art witness and try to comprehend the panorama of American social history–from women’s suffrage, three wars, the ice box, photography, and the invention of the two-by-four, to indoor plumbing and electrification, the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and Dachau, foxglove, the Love That Dare Not Speak its Name, the song of the catbird, and Little Women. Over the decades, a most unusual love develops between them and quietly deepens, until one day in 2010 an art historian from New York happens to see the portrait of Mrs. Peale and, abruptly, everything changes.