Revisiting the Boarding House Story
Ripe for Our Times
First a Story
When the publisher, St. Martin’s, went to launch Doug Coupland’s Generation X, they pissed off millions. For weeks up to the book’s pub date St. Martin’s faxed a page-sized, bold, black “X” to every fax machine in North America. Unexplained. It created such a panic in 1991: these ominous black Xs rolling out of every office fax machine. Was it political? What did it mean? Soon the book dropped. Mystery solved. But it was exactly this brand of fax abuse that got fax abuse made illegal.
The moral? Publicity is anything you can do before it’s outlawed.
Which Brings Us to the Boarding House Story
Still in my bulking phase, here. Flirting with ideas for short stories. Testing those ideas on friends. Analyzing old books I still love: What about them keeps me coming back?
Scratch any book I love, and most likely you’ll find it’s a “boarding house story.” By that, I mean a group of characters compelled by poverty or a shortage of housing to share a living space. Such is the soul of Minimalism: a limited cast billeted together in a cramped setting. Their energy building upon one another’s dramas. But the chief charm of boardinghouse stories – as far as I’m concerned – is that they’re populated by either very young people, or very old ones, or a mixture of both.
The characters live precarious lives, always scrambling to find love, money, jobs, health insurance, while warding off parents and family that would pull them back into a stale orbit back at some childhood home.
From More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, 1980
Mary Ann was not moving back to Cleveland. She was not running home to Mommy and Daddy. She knew that much, anyway. For all her trials, she loved it here in San Francisco, and she loved her makeshift family at Mrs. Madrigal’s comfy apartment house on Barbary Lane…
This was home now – this crumbling, ivy-entwined relic called 28 Barbary Lane – and the only parental figure in Mary Ann’s day-to-day existence was Anna Madrigal, a landlady whose fey charm and eccentric ways were legendary on Russian Hill.
The characters balance and flail through one of the most free, however dangerous, periods in modern life.
From Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia, 1991
When I was young, I thought teenage boys were the most awkward, miserable, antsy, bratty, scuzzy, snickering creatures on God’s green earth. Now at midlife and, as it were, hors de combat, I see them quite differently. Watching them rampage on the street or at a shopping mall, I find them extraordinarily moving, for they represent the masculine principle struggling to free itself from woman’s cosmic dominance.
Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones (at maximum strength at this time), run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.1
Whether the book is Generation X or Tales of the City, the characters stumble from romance to romance, mishap to adventure. The shared roof makes them an ersatz family. At this stage in life, anything could happen. In Jesus’ Son the characters are reduced to living in the roach-infested Rebel Motel, where the maids spit chewing tobacco in the shower stalls. In Generation X, the three main characters share a similar low-rent motel.
From Generation X by Douglas Coupland, 1991
Hell is the town of West Palm Springs Village – a bleached and defoliated Flintstones cartoon of a failed housing development from the 1950s. The town lies on a chokingly hot hill a few miles up the valley, and it overlooks the shimmering aluminum necklace of Interstate 10, whose double strands stretch from San Bernadino in the west, out to Blythe and Phoenix in the east…
… a modern ruin and almost deserted save for a few hearty souls in Airstream trailers and mobile homes, who give us a cautious eye… the mood is vaguely reminiscent of a Vietnam War movie set.
The boarding house story takes place in a liminal no-place between childhood and adulthood. This is where characters tread water before they have resources or networking contacts, an education, a skill, or any real plan. Here is where characters can make real mistakes — they have so little to lose.
From Clown Girl by Monica Drake, 2006
Baloneyville Co op it said, on a wooden sign above Herman’s front door. My room was the mudroom, off the kitchen in back. I opened the back door, heard a screech. The first thing I saw was the muscled, nearly naked body of Herman’s new girlfriend – Natalia, Nadia or Italia, whatever her name was. She was doubled over and laughing, knees pressed together, ready to piss her miniskirt…
…The clown money was my ticket out of Herman’s house and down to San Francisco, to Rex. I’d leave Baloneytown in the dust. Maybe I’d go to Clown College, too. Then I’d sleep in the master bedroom, not in the mudroom, right? Ta da!
In the boarding house story, the young and old are thrown together. Anna Madrigal, the landlady in Armistead Maupin’s books is Frl. Schroeder from 1930’s Germany is Madame Sapphia Spanella in Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All boarding house stories.
From The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, 1935
From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy, balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.
…All day long (Frl. Schroeder) goes padding about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles from room to room, in carpet slippers and a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her lodgers…
Long ago, before the War and the Inflation, she used to be comparatively well off. She went to the Baltic for her summer holidays and kept a maid to do the housework. For the last thirty years she has lived here and taken in lodgers. She started doing it because she liked to have company…
And now Frl. Schroeder has not even a room of her own. She has to sleep in the living-room, behind a screen, on a small sofa with broken springs…
She is fond of pointing out to me the various marks and stains left by lodgers who have inhabited this room:…
Given Our Current Housing Crisis
Given our current housing crisis, I’m surprised some writer hasn’t reinvented the boarding house. I know I tried in 1988, when my 20-something friends pitched me on the idea of buying a derelict four-story candy factory. They proposed that we’d each partition off half of a floor, giving everyone at least 5000 square feet of raw concrete space. A loft! The plan broke every housing and fire code, but we were desperate. We’d be living as gritty outlaws, and if crimes began to occur we’d have to deal with the criminals by ourselves. As a gothic situation, an urban gothic, it had all the earmarks of Delicatessen or Home Bodies. Even so, we were desperate for stable housing. When the (very) shaky real estate deal fell through, I wrote it into a failed novel, If You Lived Here, You’d be Home Already.
And when that novel failed, it wrote the situation into another novel. Yeah, a boarding house story.
From Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, 1996
The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures… The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a basement. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor… the house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down.
One poverty-row, run-down building is pretty much another. In our current world, so much like Isherwood’s Berlin, where inflation is high and housing is scarce, it puzzles me that we aren’t reinventing the boarding house novel. Retired people are squeezed by loneliness and the rising cost of living. As are younger people.
Whatever writer can create a new model for low-cost communal living… and people it with appealing, relatable characters (old, young, or both)… that writer will shape a generation.
If you’ve not got a copy, the above Generation X, 30th Anniversary Edition is up for grabs. Whoever hits me up first in the Comments below gets the book. I’ll ship it to anyone in the United States – and for now, England.2
The same, I would say, goes for young women controlled by spouses.
So long as the shipping charges hover around fifty bucks.
My Baby Talk prize came today. Nobody does a package like you, Chuck. Truly spectacular. Thank you so much!! It made my entire week.
Have you read Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong? It’s kind of a boardinghouse novel in the sense that a very young man without any place to live starts living in a falling down dilapidated house owned by an old woman battling dementia. They take care of each other and they are both on the edges of society in the same way as you describe. And the social grouping requirement is satisfied with the addition of a fast food restaurant where the young man finds a job and interacts with others who are in liminal states.
On another note, back in early nineties NYC, my friends and I seriously considered buying a boarded up, broken tenement in the east village, but no amount of research got us closer to figuring out who owned it and how to buy it.