Reviewed by Shawn LaTorre
Posted on: October 22, 2022
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Ellen Barker’s novel East of Troost takes the reader on a detailed journey of a woman who moves back into her childhood home in Missouri after a tragic fire consumes her home in California. Her parents left that home over thirty years earlier, finding the neighborhood increasingly dangerous after several homes in the area were razed to make room for a highway. With the change, crime increased, making adjoining neighborhoods unfavorable places to live.
The middle-aged main character moves back home with her dog, Boris, with plans to renovate and meet her neighbors. She reflects upon her high school with the realization that “the Fair Housing Act may have opened up more housing choices for Black families, but it was already clear that they were not necessarily able to buy their homes or live safely within them.” In coming home, she notes, “…it didn’t really register with me for a long time that what I was seeing was a deliberate act, quiet policies at work keeping west of Troost White while east of Troost was allowed to ‘turn Black.'”
Barker’s style of writing is easy to understand, though her protagonist’s train of thoughts at times may overwhelm. A reader must be prepared and willing to become immersed in following and understanding the inner thoughts of her main character, the narrator. William James officially labeled this writing technique in his book The Principles of Psychology as stream of consciousness. Stream of consciousness writing can be quite challenging to read, even though many modern writers, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, and Dorothy Richardson embraced the style, and it continues to be popular with some of today’s writers.
Potential challenges aside, interesting topics related to housing, crime, the racial divide, and looking at “home” from a new perspective meld with the narrator’s home renovations. She is not without her doubts as to whether or not this move was the right thing for her. She calls up her former best friend, whose childhood home was demolished, and the two talk about old times. After a terrifying experience with the police at the mobile phone store, the protagonist considers leaving. “This is not my world anymore. I don’t mind that, but I don’t know what my world is anymore. I’m not unhappy in this place, but I’m not happy either.” A reader gets a good sense of the trials and shifting emotions of a single woman who finds herself alone and having to take care of a household with only her dog for companionship.
Adept at sharing the innermost thoughts and decisions of her main character, Barker elevates a timeless dilemma of the human condition: Can one ever truly go home again? How does history reveal much that our day to day never knew? East of Troost delves courageously into such evocative territory, showing in the end how faith in mankind can transcend all ages.
