Foundations
DETAILS: Publisher: Whisk(e)y Tit Publication Date: March 7, 2023 Format: eARC Length: 153 pg. Read Date: February 22, 2023]
What’s Foundations About?
This is a novel about a house in Dallas, TX. It’s told in three eras—early 50s, early 80s, and something relatively recent. Those dates are pretty vague (and precision isn’t that important), but those are my best guesses based on details mentioned in the text.
In each of these eras, the house is owned (or lived in) by three different women, and we spend a little time with each of them and see their relationship (for lack of a better term) with the building.
Bunny
Bunny should give the reader a very Betty Draper vibe—but without quite as many issues. Essentially, she’s a lonely housewife whose husband spends more time at his club or on the road for his company than he does at home. Her sister lives nearby and the two do spend time together, but it doesn’t appear there’s a strong bond between them.
She spends time regularly at the library—secretly, it should be added—reading a variety of things for pleasure and education. At some point, she begins dabbling in things like palmistry, which leads one of the librarians to befriend her and introduce her to people and ideas Bunny hadn’t encountered before.
There’s a great paragraph where Bunny imagines her house as a museum and her as one of the exhibits. I don’t know that we learned much about her in that paragraph, but it crystalizes everything about her that her portion of the novel was saying in just a few lines.
Jessica
Jessica is an actress who (to paraphrase her), has passed her opportunity to be seen as a sexy star and has become eligible only for Lady Macbeth parts (since we’re not given details about her age, I do wonder a bit about that, considering the ages of some of the actresses she alludes to, but it’s not that important).
Now she wants to be away from L.A., where everyone recognizes her as someone who “used to” be in movies or on stage. So she moves to Dallas, buying the home.
She lives a very solitary life—which is her plan, after all—but it doesn’t take long for the shortcomings of that kind of life to become clear to her.
Amanda
Amanda buys the house to flip it as a competitor on a Reality TV show where she’ll be competing against people from across the country doing the same thing.
This is an outreach of work she’s done to make her brand—she’s done a little interior decorating and is striving to be a life coach—and this show could put her on the map.
We watch her chronicle her work to refresh the house on her own social media and the show’s filming. At the same time, she’s dealing with parental pressure to settle down and her boyfriend’s ambivalence toward her activities.
So, what did I think about Foundations?
I honestly don’t know what to think of the book as a whole. I think one of the pieces of art that Amanda picks for the house does a really good job of describing what the novel aspires to (a ceramic statue of three intertwined women), but I’m not particularly sure that the novel intertwines them that much. Their connection feels much more coincidental and circumstantial.
Considered separately, I have some definite thoughts on each woman’s story. It felt to me that Bunny’s story was the most realized, the most developed, and really showed more of the spirit the novel seems to want to show. Her life of quiet desperation feels familiar—like one we’ve all seen time and time again, but Stewart’s depiction of it is as fresh as it ever was.
Jessica’s segment of the book is the least developed, and possibly more of a cliche than Bunny’s. It also felt rushed with an ending that was too pat—I think if we’d had more time with Jessica, I might have reacted better to her and her situation. While I appreciated the character, I thought she got short shrift and it was hard to connect to her.
Amanda, on the other hand, was easy to relate to and connect with. Part of that comes from her living in the present, with immediately identifiable struggles, complaints, and interests. But there was more than that—Bunny just exists until she finds her new friend, and Jessica is running away from things—Amanda has hopes and dreams—she may not be certain about where she’s going long-term, but for the short-term, she has a plan and is focused on it. I think that’s what I appreciated most about her. Still, I think we could’ve gotten a little more time with her, too, to fully flesh her out (but it wouldn’t take much more)—but Jessica needs those pages more than Amanda did.
You can consider the book to show the changing face of feminism through the years, and as such, it’s successful. But I don’t know that it actually says anything about those faces beyond just helping the reader to see them.
Obviously, setting the book in Dallas plays a role in what’s expected for each woman—how they should act, how they should relate to the world around them, how they should feel about spending their days in this house. But I wonder if the danger in stereotyping Dallas is as great as some of the preconceptions of how a woman should comport themselves is.*
* Of course, I realize that coming from a man, that notion could be problematic. So I do want to stress that’s something I wonder about, and don’t have a firm opinion on. Stewart and her characters are apt to reach a conclusion that doesn’t match mine.
It’s a quick read—only 150 pages or so—with some passages and phrases that will knock you out. Different readers will walk away with varied impressions of the three women than me (obviously), and some will likely see something in the whole novel that I’ve missed (I’m hoping someone can show me what I’m not seeing). But I don’t think many will be able to walk away unaffected.
I do recommend this book—I think the small investment of time required will pay dividends for the reader above that.
Disclaimer: I received this eARC from the author and Lori Hettler of The Next Best Book Club in exchange for this post—thanks to both for this.
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