Contemporary American Fixer-Uppers

Abstract Chapter 13, “Contemporary American Fixer-Uppers,” illuminates a recent shift from hostility to affection for big, old fictional houses in an aging America, where once-imposing, now decaying mansions just need “a little love,” as the fixer-upper shows put it. The opening surveys the twentieth-century popular cultural re-embrace of big, old, dilapidated houses, from films to TV shows (of the Gothic and the “renovation reality” varieties), to the “old house” metaphor of historian Isabel Wilkerson’s treatise on racism in America. The chapter then treats recent fictions in which literal renovation also pursues a moral repair, not of alien, Old World crimes, but of homegrown American ills. Five fixer-upper texts constitute a contemporary, post-Gothic subgenre in which a funky, old, decrepit house is “haunted” literally or figuratively by a flaw needing fixing in the house of the nation: novels by Mat Johnson (racism and denial of mixed-race identity), Alison Bechdel (homophobia), Maria Semple (sexism), and Stephen McCauley (real estate commodity fetishism); and a film by Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails (racism, income inequality, real estate discrimination). Whether the house is mostly ironized or embraced, ultimately reclaimed, irretrievably lost, or left behind for a worthier home, each hero pursues an ideal still felt to be precious in the aging house of the nation.