Without the suggestion from a book club buddy, The Irresistible Henry House probably wouldn’t have found a spot on my personal book list. But now I’m grateful to have read it.
Lisa Grunwald’s book isn’t great literature. But, it is an intriguing novel about a phenomenon that lasted from the 1920s until the 1960s on many college campuses. Orphanages “loaned” babies to home economic departments so young women could gain practical experience caring for infants. The young women would rotate week by week, caring for the child over the course of the year. Then the college would return the toddler to the orphanage for adoption, and a younger infant would be put in place.
Grunwald tells the fictitious tale of one such baby, Henry House. But in the story, instead of returning him to the orphanage, the home economics instructor (a widowed, unbending woman) adopts and raises Henry. He becomes a charming child who can copy any artwork, though he can’t come up with original, creative ideas. He’s irresistible to women, able to manipulate them as he wishes. You can guess where that trait leads him.
The story has it’s Forrest Gump elements, as Henry comes of age in the early 1960s. He becomes an animator, works on Mary Poppins and meets Walt Disney. Then he goes to London and meets the Beatles during his stint as an animator for Yellow Submarine. Sometimes, it felt like Grunwald forced the symbolic elements of the story when she didn’t need to. The premise of the story was intriguing enough.
But, a personal connection kept me reading The Irresistible Henry House: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The more I read of Henry, the more his behavior resembled adults who experienced childhood trauma that resulted in PTSD. It made me think about infants who spend weeks and months in neonatal or pediatric intensive care units, being cared for by a constant rotation of nurses.
SInce finishing The Irresistible Henry House, thoughts of those children have consumed me. And I know it’s time to get serious about developing a proposal for a book about PTSD in kids.
So thanks, book club buddy, for putting The Irresistible Henry House on the reading list. And thanks, Lisa Grunwald, for moving the PTSD book proposal to the top of my to do list.
Anybody volunteers to clean my house so I can actually work on it?
