The House Beautiful: A Novel of High Ideals, Low Morals, and Lower Rent Book

The Further Adventures of B.K. Troop

Allison Burnett has succeeded in creating a literary character so unique and thoroughly painted that in his first novel CHRISTOPHER B.K. Troop emerged as a middle aged, overweight, fussy, alcoholic gay man whose distorted views of his world provided us with some of the finest comic writing of the past few years. Happily, Burnett has given us another installment in what many of us hope will be a continuing saga of this strangely loveable dreamer.

B.K. Troop has just inherited a Manhattan brownstone from his beloved friend Sasha Buchwitz, allowing him to move form his meager quarters into a large house he calls The House Beautiful - with large mortgage payments, payments he can only meet by taking in renters. This event opens the opportunity for Troop to fulfill his dream of being the muse and champion of artists. By advertising the rooms in his new edifice as `low rent' he attracts artists of all types - the sole proviso being that those selected as tenants repay his generosity by actively pursuing their particular art form.

And so we gradually meet his tenants: Carl Alan Dealy is a hygienically challenged actor waiting for audition calls that never come; Michael is a philosopher whose musings on his own character serve as fodder for his writings; Mary Pilago is a lesbian singer-songwriter who concentrates more on transient bed mates than on practicing her guitar and singing; Miranda Buchner is an Expressionist painter waiting for her `big show' while she pines for Michael's attentions; Louise D'Aprix is a writer committed to her typewriter to create the longest novel ever written. Into this hot bed of artists playing their desires for are against their escapades with sensual needs enters one Adrian Malloy, a very young lad carrying a garbage bag of what Troop perceives as vast pages of poetry and writings. In reality Adrian is an astronomy student who has fled to Manhattan to escape his confining Midwest home of his recently deceased parents, people with oddly occult ties to the unknowing Troop!

How Troop influences the lives of these characters (while simultaneously dealing with his new lover, Vietnamese cook Pip who proves to be a truly colorful number!) is the playing field on which Burnett weaves his fascinatingly integrated tales from another city (in some ways related to Armisted Maupin's San Francisco `Tales of the City' series). Troop may be a demanding queen but he is also the loving and caring stimulus for those disparate but co-dependent tenants. His particular devotion to drawing out the `poet' in Adrian is witty and wise and lovely. "A biologist is able to tell you why a fly is able to sustain itself in flight. Only a poet can describe why it annoys you."

Burnett's gift (and a superb writer he is!) lies in his ability to create strong characters, exploring each of them thoroughly while very carefully maintaining an interaction among all of them. Each artist contributes at times inadvertently but always cohesively to the changes that occur in the summer of communal living. But always at the helm is the wholly engrossing B.K. Troop, besieged by misadventures in love, at times hilarious but with equal portions of compassion as a true Impresario. Think Diaghilev, Tennessee Williams, Divine, with a dollop of Gertrude Stein and Troop begins to come into focus. Burnett knows his craft well. He is simply wildly entertaining while remaining a highly literate and brilliant writer. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp