The house Emma and her wife have purchased in Riverbend, a small college town in Indiana, has a dark history and two invisible inhabitants. “Emma had felt the house was haunted from the moment Rachel opened the door with their new key.” She’s not wrong.
Charlotte and Dirk, the older couple who owned the house before they were evicted, defrauded, and foreclosed on, are living in the attic, which can only be accessed by a hidden door in the garage; in fact, Emma and Rachel are not aware that the house even has an attic.
One branch of the bold and twisting plot of “The New People,” Andrea Uptmor’s fascinating, highly original debut goes back to trace the unfolding of Charlotte and Dirk’s nightmare, firmly rooted in the financial crisis of 2008, and observes the details of their makeshift life beneath the sharply sloping roof of the attic, which Dirk hastily (and without permits) converted to serve as a bedroom for their now grown and long-gone son.
The two couples whose lives have become so bizarrely intertwined could not be more different, as we learn in alternating chapters following the eponymous “new people.” Emma and Rachel are lesbian academics who traveled from their home in Chicago to get married at San Francisco’s City Hall on the day in June 2008 when California legalized same-sex marriage. They have come to Riverbend so Rachel can take a tenure-track position in the English department at Boon College; to sweeten the offer, they’ve included an adjunct contract for Emma.
The inequality between academic superstar (and blonde beauty!) Rachel and still-struggling, somewhat ungainly Emma is a real stone in the shoe of the relationship, significantly exacerbated when a science-fiction novel Rachel wrote to keep herself busy while waiting for news about her dissertation blew up into a huge bestseller. Meanwhile, Emma, who is the MFA-certified writer of the couple, cannot even find an agent for her own manuscript, and a deal with an independent publisher fell apart when the press folded. To top off her feelings of inadequacy, she has recently miscarried an in-vitro pregnancy of eleven weeks. “And when it ended, Emma’s self-loathing quietly seeped back in, like rain filling a footprint in the mud.”
What Charlotte and Emma have in common is that they are both miserable and filled with resentment, and both of them begin to express their feelings through eyebrow-raising bad behavior. Charlotte sneaks down into the main house every day when the women leave for work to use their kitchen, bathroom, and computer. In addition to stealing food, she indulges in escalating acts of aggression, moving their possessions, unplugging their appliances, making a deep scratch in what was once her mother’s credenza, retrieved from the garage and sloppily painted bright yellow by Emma.
Emma, meanwhile, had hoped to leave adjunct teaching behind forever to concentrate on her writing, but now she’s been sucked into three sections of introductory rhetoric. In one of them, she meets her nemesis, a boy named Alex Brewer whose disrespectful behavior and conservative attitudes immediately make him an attention-sucking adversary. In his first essay, a generally well-written analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper, he slips into direct taunting: “Take for example a hypothetical professor who teaches a class where no one speaks up. She must wonder, is it because she has failed as an instructor and no one knows any answers, or is it because no one can respect her when she wears her self-doubt like a crown?” Emma tosses this piece of work in the trash and pretends she never received it. When the boy’s next paper topics are abortion and Proposition 8 (which repealed gay marriage in California), Emma’s reckless reactions will end her up in very deep water professionally.
And Alex Brewer is not the only one pushing Emma’s buttons. Her new next-door neighbor Patty is homophobic, rude, and constantly barging into the backyard to take care of Charlotte’s abandoned garden.
Having set up this borderline unbelievable situation, Uptmor moves ahead with it fearlessly both upstairs and downstairs, at the same time demonstrating that she’s not afraid of dislikable characters, either. Charlotte and Emma are gasp-worthy in their childish vindictiveness and poor decision-making, and even the so-perfect Rachel is a bit annoying. In absentia, we know Charlotte’s estranged son Justin only via her memories, through which he emerges as a drug-addicted loser who treated his mother like dirt. Only Dirk, Charlotte’s ailing husband, seems to be a bona fide saint.
As impressive as Uptmor’s authorial daring with plot and characters is her rich setting, deploying all the details of life as we knew it in the year 2008. The housing market crash and resulting foreclosures; the precarity of the academic job market and the politicization of the college curriculum; the growing red-blue divide, deepening all through the Obama presidency — all of these and more are woven into the plot in a way that makes the system the villain rather than any one of the flawed and desperate characters.
All in all, Uptmor has pulled off quite a coup in a debut novel. In a word: sold.
THE NEW PEOPLE
By Andrea Uptmor
Little, Brown, 320 pages, $29
Marion Winik is the author of “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead,” and the host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader.”