Review: 'Red Island House,' by Andrea Lee

"Red Island House," Andrea Lee's latest novel, is marbled with the rich imagery of Madagascar's landscape. The dense, delicious prose is packed, from the opening pages, with a blend of historic and current events, context and conflict, as Shay — a Black American professor from Oakland, Calif. — joins her Italian husband, Senna, at their custom-built palatial home, known to neighbors as the "Red House."

Senna's initial decision to eschew a local ritual engenders "inevitable consequences," and things begin to go awry. "As is so often the case, it becomes a woman's job to clean things up," Lee writes, with a tone of foreboding humor that gives the novel much of its texture.

Shay's role as the mistress of the Red House is complicated by race: Kristos, the white house manager Senna hires, is known among the staff to be virulently racist. Although he treats Shay with contempt, Senna defends him. "He is the overseer," Shay thinks. "She feels as if she is witnessing a shadow play of the experiences of her own enslaved ancestors."

This territory is overrun with possibilities for conflict, and Lee wisely allows many of them to unfold during Kristos' tenure and beyond.

The novel's structure is a series of discrete tales — "The Packet War," "The Children," "Blondes" and others — and each sounds a note of caution. The stories have an uppermost layer of luxury — Shay as mistress of the Red House — and a subtext of grotesque violence and danger. In "The Packet War," Shay rids the household of Kristos eventually, but she continues to find herself in uncomfortable situations with locals.

In "The Children," a young brother and sister claim to be the progeny of a renowned, wayward Italian aristocrat; in an attempt to learn more about their story through her Italian connections, Shay delivers only hardship and disappointment. Her academic career allows the third-person narration to take on the political implications of the setting and characters — such as in "Blondes" — without seeming to veer off on a topical detour.

In "Sirens," she remains mostly on the sidelines, reflecting on the relationship between two Italian expatriates through a rather anthropological gaze.

Shay turns her gaze inward, as well: In "Voice," she "reflects … that no one from an African nation can understand the peculiarities of being African American." In "Elephants' Graveyard," she tracks the deterioration of her marriage.

Lee approaches the broadly political and the minutely intimate with equally fine prose. "The life of an island is about watching for those who arrive and dreaming of those who depart," Shay thinks. Lee offers a fascinating sequence of arrivals and departures.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, the Millions, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-2016 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Red Island House
By: Andrea Lee.
Publisher: Scribner, 276 pages, $27.