Grab the Lapels

To the Birdhouse by Cathleen Schine

According to her bio, Cathleen Schine has done work in pretty much every magazine in New York City. I’m guess that makes her a real New Yorker. And her novel, To the Birdhouse, is partially set in New York City where Alice and Peter live in an apartment. Peter works from home, something to do with baseball statistics, and Alice takes pictures for a barely-read nature publication. Neither job appears to be the kind that would support a New York City apartment in the 1990’s, but whatever, if we believe Carrie Bradshaw could write a little dating column and have both an NYC apartment and Manolo Blahnik’s, well, why not.

The novel opens at Peter and Alice’s wedding. Alice’s father brought his new wife, and Alice’s mother brought her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Louie Scifo. Alice’s brother brought a graduate student from Japan, and somehow it’s a running gag that the brother always has a new girlfriend that is never American. Not sure why that is funny. Apparently, Peter has no family because the author doesn’t bother including them.

The problem is Louie Scifo. He’s a liar. He’s one of those men who have been everywhere and done everything, and he’s both been more places and done more things that you. If you have cancer, he has two cancers. Alice’s mother, Brenda, breaks up with Louie when he says something anti-semitic, but she’s quick to return to him for reasons not made clear in the novel. Somehow, it’s supposed to be quirky, maybe even funny, that throughout To the Birdhouse, Louie Scifo is stalking Brenda, Alice, Peter, and Alice’s brother.

Eventually, Brenda, Alice, Peter, Alice’s brother, and Grandma go to the family vacation house, where Louie previously lived with Brenda and completed such shoddy maintenance that the home is falling apart. It’s now a money suck, but it’s the family money suck, dang it! Louie manages to become the handyman for the neighbor. He pushes the mover back and forth in one spot all day, every day. Louie makes phone calls during which he says obscene things. Somehow, him doing this for almost a year is supposed to be funny.

I read To the Birdhouse aloud to Nick, and I think the reason we finished it is because it was somehow a fast read. We didn’t like or connect with any characters. The “quirky” parts didn’t generate any laughter. No one underwent character development. The most realistic character was an “unorthodox” scummy lawyer who rode a motorcycle.

Strangely, just yesterday Nick and I were listening to a podcast on which they discussed the 1987 thriller/mystery/occult movie Angel Heart. One character’s name is Louis Cyphre, which, much to our surprise, was pronounced like “Louie Scifo.” Once I Googled the name and saw the spelling, I realized it’s a play on “Lucifer,” but that’s not the way the British podcasters said it. Perhaps Schine saw Angel Heart and borrowed Louie Scifo’s name? He certainly is a horrible man.

In the end, the strongest reaction Nick and I seemed to have after the last sentence finished was moderate blinking.

20 comments

  1. Fascinating sleuthing re Louie Scifo… I would never have made the Lucifer connection reading it but you make sense.

    The book has a beautiful cover, but the way you describe it, it doesn’t sound funny. I’ll be interested to hear if any of your readers have read it and think differently. Humour can be so personal. I often see humour where others don’t… at the movies for example. I often worry that other people in the theatre might think I’m heartless and am laughing at some misfortune or other but usually it’s because I see and enjoy the absurdity in the situation or behaviour (or myself in it!)

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  2. Ha, “moderate blinking”!
    I love your description of the character who has “been more places and done more things that you.” I feel like I know a number of people like that, but one in particular.

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  5. The Washington Post says: this rambunctious comedy of manners that is at once “dizzying, hilarious, authentic, and original”. It just sounds try-hard to me.
    And it’s not just Carrie Bradshaw, all sit-com characters do so little work for so much money.

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  8. What an odd little book. Quirky doesn’t seem to cover it – just odd. I don’t understand how people can afford to live in New York city at all, SJP none withstanding. Was the 1990s significantly cheaper?

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