SEX AND REAL ESTATE: Why We Love Houses By Marjorie Garber Pantheon, 243 pages, $35
Marjorie Garber's most resonant claim, in this book full of them, is that attending real-estate open houses is now, for many people, the equivalent of the fin-de-siècle stroll of a Parisian flaneur. It is, she says, a form of socially acceptable voyeurism in which the well-heeled and the round-heeled alike can saunter through the living spaces of other people in an attitude of cool, sometimes dismissive, appraisal.
There, amid the smells of false cinnamon or real anxiety, we assess not so much the present owners' character as their sense of romantic taste. The house, Garber argues, is a love-object, and that is never more obvious than when it is passing from one set of hands into another. The real-estate market embraces both romantic comedy and jealous tragedy, Swing Time and Othello in about equal measure.
I don't attend open houses myself, having grown used to the small one-bedroom apartment in Toronto I've occupied for almost a decade. And I don't scan the thick real-estate listings available in those plastic newspaper boxes; or pause, smitten, before agents' windows, with their glossy photos and enticing, abbreviated language of seduction. But I do walk the streets of my neighbourhood and pass judgment on renovations and paint choices, fixtures and floral borders. I imagine myself reclining in that room, relaxing in that garden. When my brother and sister-in-law used to visit me in New England, we always took day trips that featured a game called "House of the Day," the purpose and rules of which are probably obvious.
In short, though not yet a homeowner, I can relate to Garber's witty analysis of our love affair with houses. I suspect virtually everybody can, since the deep human associations with shelter and home are universal. They are also complex, mysterious and occasionally blinding. "The house and all that it symbolizes is the repository of histories, memories, fantasies, self-images, aspirations, and dreams," Garber writes. "That is why our romance with houses is -- in every sense -- such a consuming passion."
Garber's book, a deft untangling of these threads, is organized in chapters that come at the house from different angles: as mother, as body, as dream house, as trophy and so on. Each functions as a stand-alone essay, but together they create an exemplary volume of sustained cultural criticism. (Her previous book, a collection of essays called Symptoms of Culture, achieved the same effect with more disparate materials.) An English professor at Harvard, Garber writes with both clarity and authority. Her survey of the cultural obsession with the house is comprehensive yet light-handed.
Some of it will be familiar. The sections of the book dealing with upscale "shelter" magazines and their clientele, an ironic dissection of the infatuations and dejections of boomer house-suitors, have a slightly pro-forma feeling. We've all heard this before, perhaps even in the pages of this newspaper. (Here's the bottom line, if your house is a rock under which you've been living lately: Nowadays, people are willing to go to absurd lengths in pursuit of what they consider the ideal home.) Garber's only virtue here is the extent of her research. She seems to have read and digested just about every glossy magazine, slick brochure, advertising spread and marketing prospectus the industry has to offer.
But the book gets better, indeed becomes brilliant, when Garber moves beyond these handy materials to situate contemporary house-love in more intricate historical and psychological territory. Blending allusion, diagnosis and personal reflection with beguiling ease, she paints a rich and humorous portrait of the sheltering, lovestruck human -- a portrait as complex and unsettling as anything to be found in the psychoanalytic literature. Along the way, everything from nostalgia to the political nature of public spaces is brought into play. (So, for that matter, is play.)
Her key insight about what a lesser writer once labelled the "edifice complex" concerns the essentially conflicted nature of human desire. Houses are sites of dreams, and the dream house is what most people poring over the shelter mags -- better labelled "lifestyle porn" -- are after. But dreams are sometimes nightmares, and houses can be haunted. Moreover, the dream, once realized, murders the desire that spawned it. Which is why there is always another house, somebody else's, to covet. And which is also why we live in a constant state of bad faith about our immersion in the guilty pleasures of the material world.
The house, formerly immobile and "real" (as opposed to "personal," the estate that could be moved and sold), is now annihilated by our own mobile and shifting yearnings. Ever in the throes of a deep bad faith about materialism, we are constantly looking to move, and move up. In the relentless real-estate market of the modern age, Garber notes, "the house becomes a commodity, and thus just as subject to all the anxieties of commodity culture from Puritan guilt to (what is its inverse and spectral double) 'pecuniary emulation.' " No reader will come away from this book with his or her sense of dwelling unchanged.
But speaking of dwelling, there are a few gaps. While Gaston Bachelard and Sigmund Freud get their due, there is no mention of Martin Heidegger's provocative existential meditation on inhabiting locations, Building Dwelling Thinking. Many famous literary houses are toured, including those erected by Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but not the gabled ones imagined by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Lucy Maud Montgomery. And except by perverse implication -- observe all this bourgeois luxury-seeking! -- there is no discussion of the evils of homelessness in our cities and around the world.
Nevertheless, Sex and Real Estate is a wonderful book, social analysis that is timely, accessible and challenging. And with her fund of gracious, self-deprecating humour and vast learning lightly worn, Marjorie Garber is one of those writers it is easy to fall in love with. I don't know if I want to see inside her house, though. What if she has bad window treatments? Contributing reviewer Mark Kingwell teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto. His essay The Dream House, which appeared last year in the design magazine Azure, is adapted in his forthcoming book, The World We Want , to be published in September.
FROM SEX AND REAL ESTATE
When you stop to think about it, buying and selling a house is a lot like dating. The same emotional overinvestment; the same daydreaming; the same quickening of the pulse; the lingering around the phone, willing it to ring; the surreptitious visit to the place where you know the desired one will be, just to catch another glimpse ("it won't hurt just to drive by -- it's only a little bit out of the way"). And, of course, all too often the same broken heart.
Check the real estate pages in your local paper. What you'll find are "singles" ads. Literally. "Smashing single." "Fabulous renovated single w/custom euro kit." "Very handsome & oversized 2BR." "Exclusive, adorable, customized." . . . "Cute and cozy." "Bright and cheerful 3 BR Colonial in super loc." Bright and cheerful, handsome and oversized, adorable: these are the siren songs of houses with personality, fabulous, available "singles" waiting for mates.
The vocabulary of real estate is flirty, seductive, a come-on. "Classic Beauty, Sutton Area," "Light & Lovely on West End Avenue," "Prewar Beauty" -- this is the language of New York real estate. Compare these invitations to those for "Gorgeous, statuesque brunette, "Classic Mediterranean good looks," "Soul soothing, attractive, trim," or "Wonderful, professional SWF 41, beautiful inside and out," all from the Meet Your Match personal line of my local newspaper. . . . What they promise is not just a place but a relationship.