Rose/House

(by Arkady Martine)

I picked this one up randomly at the library and am glad I did: this turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable read for me. One of the epigraphs is a quote from this New Yorker article by Alice Gregory about the architect Luis Barragán, and I’d recommend reading the article as a companion piece after you read the book. Martine borrows some elements and phrases from the article (an architect whose ashes are made into a diamond, a sealed archive, an architect who wants to make “houses into gardens, and gardens into houses” and creates buildings whose “floor plans only gradually make themselves evident to the visitor”). But she makes those elements into something new that’s part locked-room murder mystery and part haunted house story, with musings on humanity/AI/consciousness.

The story is set in the future—at one point the year 2180 is referenced as being in the past—but the world doesn’t feel that different from our own: now, but with certain things amplified. There are glancing references to “people getting killed for their water rations” and “air credits” and too little or too much rain, all of which imply a worsened climate crisis; there are self-driving electric cars; there are smart homes taken further, particularly in the case of Rose House, which is a house in the Mojave desert that is not just “embedded with an artificial intelligence” but actually “is an artificial intelligence.” Rose House, which is described as “all hardened glass and stucco walls curving and curving, turning in on themselves” initiates the action of the book, in a way, by making a legally-mandated phone call: there’s a dead body inside, and Rose House needs to alert the police. But it doesn’t have to actually allow the police in to investigate, and it isn’t much inclined to: the architect who created it has been dead for a year, and as part of the terms of his will, only one living person is allowed to enter: Selene Gisil, an ex-student who’s now the dead architect’s unwilling archivist. The detective who answers the call from Rose House figures she’d better get in touch with Selene, and the plot unfolds from there, with more than one mystery to solve: who is the corpse in Rose House, and how did he get in, and what did he want, and how did he die? And, perhaps most important: what secrets might Rose House be holding?

I found the style of this novella really engaging—it’s big on mood/setting in a way that I found satisfying, and the prose is fluid and often gorgeous. I read this over the course of a long weekend and it was such a good book for that kind of mini-break.