The Town Drunk, November 2007

We’ve all listened to ads or messages and thought they’ve got the perfect voice. Just enough personality shines through to add depth and interest to the words and keep you happy while you punch your way through the endless phone tree or perform some mundane task. I love being told I made a wrong turn by the seductive guy on my GPS. How about artificial intelligence imbued with the voice used to record its messages? So goes “House 1.0″ by Kenneth Yu.

Some bad things that happen in “House 1.0,” a sweet, amusing look at the trials and tribulations of family life. But its unconventional structure didn’t work for me.

I found the story hard to read even though the prose is simple and straightforward. Perhaps Yu’s intent was to have the nameless characters meld together into a collective consciousness. But there are sections where there is no clear point of view, and during the course of the story, the reader head-hops from Mother to Father to House, then back to Father, then to Junior (with one paragraph from the vantage point of Fiancé). By the time it ended with Voice, I was so distracted by the omniscient narration, I couldn’t figure out how they all got where they were. But a pleasant voice did linger in the background.