the dream house craig higginson essay

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The Dream House Summary & Study Guide

The Dream House Summary & Study Guide Description

The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: Higginson, Craig. The Dream House. Picador Africa, March 1, 2013. Kindle.

In the novel The Dream House by Craig Higginson, South African native Phiwayinkosi Ndlovu, best known as Looksmart, works for a land development company in charge of building a gated community on the farm where Looksmart was born and raised. Looksmart makes a trip to the farm to confront Patricia Wiley, a White woman who took a special interest in him. She ensured that he had the schooling he needed to be a success in life. Despite the advantages Patricia gave Looksmart, an event occurred when a South African native named Grace suffered a cruel death. Richard, Patricia’s husband, intentionally set loose a dog to maul Grace. The death of Grace makes Looksmart realize that Patricia is a racist like her husband. Looksmart visits Patricia intending to make her understand how her behavior impacted him.

With the help of their South African maid and cook, Beauty, Patricia and Richard are packing to leave the farm on which they have lived since they were married. They will move to the house where Patricia grew up, a house by the sea in Durham. Workers have already begun to demolish farm outbuildings and construct new houses on the farm. Because Richard is suffering with senility, Patricia has told him little about the move. Their marriage has not been happy. They married because Patricia was pregnant. The baby, whom they named Rachel, was stillborn. Patricia was unable to get pregnant again. Richard had multiple affairs through the course of their marriage. Patricia had one affair that lasted through most of their union.

Patricia is surprised when Looksmart visits her on the evening before she and Richard are to move. She is hurt because Looksmart shows off how successful he has become and appears to be intentionally rude. Patricia is surprised when Looksmart tells her that he wants to talk to her about Grace and the way she died. Patricia admits that she does not remember much about that day. In fact, she did not even remember that Looksmart had still been on the farm when Grace died. She agrees that Looksmart was there only after Beauty confirmed that Looksmart was the one who took Grace to the hospital.

Looksmart tells Patricia that before Grace died, Richard had been raping her. He says that Richard intentionally let the dog loose, hoping that it would hurt Grace. Looksmart told Patricia that he and Grace were in love and were planning to get married. He explains he left the farm after Grace died because he feared that he would kill Richard if he did not. He tells Patricia that he realized she was racist as a result of that situation because she hesitated when Looksmart wrapped Grace in a blanket to take her to the hospital in Patricia’s car. He claims he could see in Patricia’s eyes that she did not want Grace’s blood on her seats and suggested they take the truck instead. The truck, however, was gone. By the time enough blankets had been laid in the back seat of the car to satisfy Patricia, Grace had bled to death before Looksmart arrived at the hospital with her.

Looksmart has returned because he wants Patricia to recognize her role in Grace’s death, a role that Patricia does acknowledge. Looksmart intends to hurt Patricia when he shows her the plans he has for the houses in the gated community. Each will be a copy of the house in which Patricia and Richard live with only slight variations. Patricia realizes Looksmart’s obsession with their house demonstrates the impact that her role in his life had on him. She also believes that his need to replicate the house illustrates the way he is replicating his pain.

The following morning, when Looksmart is gone, Patricia asks Beauty to tell her the truth about the relationship between Grace, Looksmart, and Richard. Beauty tells Patricia that Grace did not love Looksmart and did not want to marry him. Richard was paying Grace to have sex with him. She wanted to go on earning that money, but she became pregnant with Richard’s baby. Beauty says that Grace had told Richard she was pregnant on the day she died. Beauty overheard Grace say that she had to keep the baby because of her religious beliefs. She watched as Richard hit Grace and then Grace ran away. Richard unchained the dog and ordered it to go after Grace. Patricia decides at that point that when she and Richard arrive in Durham, she will arrange for him to stay in a nursing home, an option she would not consider previously.

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FOLLOW BOOKRAGS:

The Dream House

by Craig Higginson

The dream house summary and analysis of part one.

Patricia looks out her window at the mist that pervades everything. She wonders why the bloodwoods were planted, but it does not matter now: she is leaving. The developers are already here, turning stables and farm buildings to rubble. All she has told Richard, her husband, is that they are going to the sea.

She hears Beauty , her housemaid and Richard’s nurse, walking down the hallway and calls her in. She thinks Beauty has her whole life ahead of her and she will need to find something else when Patricia and Richard are gone.

Patricia asks Beauty for them to have breakfast together today and to bring Richard in, and then tells her she will be visiting Mr. Ford today. Beauty says she will tell Bheki , who drives the car. She fetches Patricia’s walker.

At breakfast, Patricia automatically listens for the dogs, but she just had the two Alsatians put down. Now there is just the Rottweiler, Ethunzini, but she has not had the heart to put her down yet. She has been surrounded by dogs her whole life. She often had Chihuahuas, and when the last one died eighteen months ago, Patricia knew it was time to sell the farm.

They are moving to the Durban house, which is 150 years old and creaks like a ship. It is where Patricia grew up and she has dreamt about it her whole life. She wants to spend her last days there, staring at the sea.

Richard walks into the kitchen. He says he wants to take the dogs to his father’s house, but the dogs are gone and his father died twenty years ago. He asks where the TV is and Patricia replies it is packed. He asks if they are dead, and says he was dreaming and they were dead. He says seriously that the ambulance is coming for the two dead children, and that she may think he’s here but he is not. These are typical Richard ramblings these days; he has needed care for a while now.

Patricia has had the same Mercedes for twenty-five years. It is more run-down now and seems to fit in less and less as the neighborhood becomes chicer. Bheki is waiting to drive her. He has agreed to stay on as their chauffeur and driver. He always loved the car when he was young. Patricia doesn't know what he feels about the move, whether it is dread or excitement, because Bheki is hard to read and speaks only of what is practical.

On the drive out, Patricia observes how the road is worse than ever, with corrugated tire tracks and half-finished houses; it seems like a war zone. Bheki drives carefully out of the area.

Patricia inherited the farm from her father when she and Richard “made their mismatch” (11) and it never made much profit, being too wet and rocky. In the seventies, Patricia decided to breed Welsh ponies and took over management of the farm from Richard. It started to do better, but only slightly and only because of her—Richard had “given up any pretence of being any good at anything after her father died” (11).

On the drive Patricia talks about her father and about Durban, telling Bheki he will like it. He responds by saying he does not like to look at the sea.

Beauty has always been frightened of UBaas (Richard), but it is just a thought in the back of her mind now. As his nurse, she knows his body better than anyone. She knows there is little left of the man. He cries randomly, sometimes calls her Mother, and wanders around the house looking for the dogs. Yet they both know that even though he is completely dependent on her, he has all the power.

When Patricia and Bheki are gone she sits and drinks from the teacup she likes, the one with the faded picture of the Queen of England on it.

Even before UBaas was mad he was mad, but she thinks that there is a bit of good in everyone. When she is alone with him she speaks isiZulu, which she knows he understands.

He comes in and is no longer wearing pants, which is not unusual. She helps him get dressed.

She and John Ford have been lovers for thirty years, though they stopped sleeping together fifteen years ago and only see each other every other month. He looks like an aged dog now, but he was once ruggedly handsome. He was first an English teacher and then the headmaster at the school. His wife Anna died of bone cancer a few years after he took that position. He is everything Richard is not, which is why Patricia thinks she loved him.

John greets her wearing his golf attire, meaning they do not have long, but they have already said their goodbyes. Patricia notices the roses need tending, but will not mention it because they were his wife’s, and any mention of Anna, however oblique, brings trouble; the afterglow of her has only grown.

They speak politely of her imminent departure, and she wonders if he will be sad to see her go. He has been very melancholy lately. In fact, he has always been a difficult man, prone to withholding, even from Anna.

They had met when Patricia brought a very clever boy from the farm to meet him for an interview. John looked more interested in her, but he helped arrange a scholarship for the boy, Looksmart . They kept meeting after that, ostensibly about the boy, and it developed into a relationship.

John tells her he has a letter for her to read, but only when she gets to Durban. She thinks he suddenly looks sweet and bashful. She agrees.

Outside in the car, she wonders why he summoned her here—to give her the letter? To apologize for himself? To say why he never loved her as much as Anna? She decides she probably won’t read it, as she is tired of his complacency.

There is still a lot to do before they go away tomorrow. There are boxes everywhere, and the moving company is supposed to come later and bring them to Durban. Beauty has been packing, making decisions herself on what does and what does not. UMesis (how Beauty refers to and thinks of Patricia) told Beauty she can bring one suitcase for the journey tomorrow, but Beauty had trouble even filling that. Her most prized possession is a small painting UMesis gave her of an English country lane leading to a church. She does not know why the watercolor pleases her so much, but it does. She also takes the teacup, the first thing she has ever deliberately stolen, though she knows she can rightfully claim it has been forgotten about.

Beauty has lived her whole life in one of the rondavels down near the dam, and her life’s goal is to have a place of her own there. She wants the same view of the Drakensberg but it will be an even closer view. She will never have a man in her house unless that man is Bheki, whom she loves but does not love her back. Beauty has known Bheki her whole life. He is older than her, slow and gruff. The only person he seems to care about is his four-year-old son Bongani , who was born without hearing.

Richard has been angling to dig up Rachel , their newborn daughter, for some time now. She has a simple grave down by the bloodwoods. There is a view of the whole valley from there, and Patricia loves it so much that she would have built the house there if it wasn’t already built. Instead, they live in the first house, a European-style edifice with a large veranda and that always seems dark inside.

Patricia remembers connecting with Richard over how their mothers died young. She remembers swimming in the ocean and making love with him, a perfect, paradisaical day that was never replicated.

It is the time of the day when Patricia would have inspected the horses, but now there are no more animals. Richard is putting on his decrepit old boots which he loves and will not get rid of. She asks where he is going but he does not reply, so she tells Beauty to tell Bheki to go with Richard.

She hopes for a dramatic storm tonight, her last night. Lightning is common in the area and even struck the farmhouse once. They also have rain often, so everything seems clammy and sodden.

Patricia rarely tidies up, so the house has cobwebs and looks just as it did when her father left it.

Patricia suggests to Richard that he take the boots off and go take a bath. Normally she tries to ignore him as much as possible, which is her survival technique. He picks up the spade, ignoring her, and lurches out. She calls for Beauty, but Beauty is gone too.

Everything at the Dwaleni farm looks exactly as he did when he left it. He smells wet earth and rot outside the car window. It has been a six-hour drive and he only stopped once as he drove across the vast, sprawling country. He is ashamed that he still is not used to being able to drive wherever he likes, expecting someone to ask him to leave. He may always feel like an intruder, “condemned to arriving at places where he will never quite belong” (34).

As he comes closer, he looks for signs of the development project he has been managing (from afar) for a year. It is messy, looking like it started and was abandoned.

He told himself he was coming here out of hate, a feeling that has been his most reliable companion for a long time. The hate has lessened a bit, and sometimes he even recollects it with fondness and some regret. As he parks in front of the Wiley house, he feels a surge of something like grief. It is not too late to turn around, he thinks. He wonders if he came here because of the Wileys or because of Grace , whom he has spent most of his life avoiding. Even in death, she is powerful. But he tells himself this is Patricia’s last night and though he is softer now due to life in the city and his wife and daughters, he has to do what he came here to do.

Patricia hears the sound of a car. Everything around her in the house seems muted. She thinks once more about burning down the house.

Patricia calls out for Beauty again. When she appears, Patricia tells her Richard has gone off with the spade, and she should get him or tell Bheki to. She tells her to check Rachel first, then the stables and other places where the animals would have been.

Out front, the dog is finally barking. Beauty looks outside and sees there is a large silver car. Patricia suggests it is one of the builders and states she is more concerned about Richard right now. Beauty leaves. The dog sounds uncomfortable. Patricia calls for Beauty twice more, and the flyscreen at the back of the house creaks open, then snaps shut.

The Dream House begins with a house—actually, two houses. Patricia Wiley and her husband Richard are leaving their one house in Dwaleni and moving the next day to another house in Durban. The novel delves into why Patricia in particular wants to leave this house and move to the other and also brings in other characters’ perspectives on the Dwaleni house and their history within it.

Patricia is the main character, and we spend comparably the most time in her narrative presence. She is an old woman, though in the text she often remembers past stages of her life, and seems tired of the vicissitudes of life. Her husband Richard, with whom she has a checkered relationship, is suffering from dementia, and her lover, John Ford, does not seem all that upset to see her leave. She has sold the property (which is hers, as it came from her beloved father) to developers and wants to spend her last days last Durban by the sea.

Critic Jane Rosenthal writes that “Patricia is central to the farm and the novel. Similarly disintegrating, she is only now, at this last minute, beginning to realize how blind and inadequate she has been for decades.” Both she and Richard are “unaware they are specimens of a past era.” We can see Patricia’s old age is mirrored in the car she drives and the condition of the house itself. First, her car is twenty-five years old and both she and it “have started to appear out of place. What was once a working farmers’ village…has become more upmarket” (9). As an old white woman in the post-apartheid era of South Africa, she has seen much of her social power change and ultimately diminish. In an interview with English Experience, Higginson describes this situation: “The landscape in transition was also something that became more prominent in the novel. On one level, the houses rising up out of the mud are structures for a brand-new future. On another level, the houses are like ruined buildings in a battle zone. The landscape of the novel is in transition and in a middle space between ruin and regeneration, which seemed to me a fitting image for contemporary South Africa.”

Thus, the property is now ravaged by developers’ earth-movers and tools and looks like “a war zone” (10), and the house has always been “covered in lichen…[and] inside it had always been as dark and dank as any cave” (28). There are “cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings, and visitors—in the days they still had visitors—complained of fleas and airlessness, as several of the windows had warped shut. Except for the occasional lick of paint, which is presently falling back into the garden in uneven, plate-sized chunks, she has kept the house exactly as her father let it” (31). Overall, the impression is that the house is old and decaying, and is a relic of an earlier age. Patricia too is old and near the end of her life, and has spent her life surrounded by a past that she finds comfortable for herself but that has obfuscated the true nature of what went on around her (Looksmart’s arrival will, of course, change all that).

Higginson also describes the condition of the house in terms of its messiness: the accouterments, accumulations, and detritus of life that are unearthed in the process of the Wileys moving. Beauty remarks that “in every room the floor is filled with boxes, boxes spilling objects from the past whose meaning remains unclear to [her]” (22). This reflects the coming events of the novel, in which Patricia and Richard’s pasts are metaphorically pulled out of the boxes they were hidden in and thrown out into the world for all to see. While this happens in a micro way in the novel, it is also reflective of the wider world of South Africa. Higginson explains, “The novel is about postapartheid South Africa more than it is about apartheid, but apartheid casts its shadow over the present, whether we like it or not. It seems that little has changed since 1994 for Beauty or Bheki, but much has changed for Looksmart. Quite a bit has also changed for Richard and Patricia, who have been left behind by the progress of history. As the novel shows, there has been more transformation in the urban than the rural areas, but the changes are finally beginning to reach the rural areas too…”

The Dream House Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Dream House is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The point essay argues that there is more tability to be found in the owining of the home. Give examples of chages that might ocurrió for a renter that are out of his or her control. Use the text for support.

All of the characters are, in some way, searching for a real home—for their "dream house." Even if they have a roof over their heads, it is difficult sometimes for them to feel as if they were really at home. Beauty longs for a home of her own, ...

What is your question here?

The Dreamhouse by Craig Higginson

Check out the themes page below:

https://www.gradesaver.com/the-dream-house/study-guide/themes

Study Guide for The Dream House

The Dream House study guide contains a biography of Craig Higginson, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Dream House
• The Dream House Summary
• Character List

Lesson Plan for The Dream House

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Dream House
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Dream House Bibliography

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The Dream House - 9781770104891

The Dream House

Description.

A farmhouse is being reproduced a dozen times, with slight variations, throughout a valley. Three small graves have been dug in the front garden, the middle one lying empty. A woman in a wheelchair sorts through boxes while her husband clambers around the old demolished buildings, wondering where the animals have gone. A young woman – called ‘the barren one’ behind her back – dreams of love, while an ageing headmaster contemplates the end of his life. At the entrance to the long dirt driveway, a car appears and pauses – pointed towards the house like a silver bullet, ticking with heat. So begins The Dream House, Craig Higginson’s riveting and unforgettable novel set in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. Written with dark wit, a stark poetic style and extraordinary tenderness, this is a story about the state of a nation and a deep meditation on memory, ageing, meaning, family, love and loss.

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The Dream House

Craig higginson, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions, richard wiley quotes in the dream house.

She doesn’t know what possessed them to plant those trees. To protect them from the wind, the sun, the view? It hardly matters now. Soon the trees will be cut down and cleared away, along with everything else. The people who come to live here afterwards will know nothing about any of them, and maybe it will be better that way.

“Are we dead yet?”

“You will tell me when we’re dead?”

“If I can, Roo, I will.”

She has many strategies to silence him. One of them, and often the most effective, is wit.

The problem of what to do with the past would have to carry on in the future.

He has a shameful secret: even today, he’s unaccustomed to the freedom he’s been given to drive around the country and go wherever he likes. Whenever he sits down in a restaurant or cinema, surrounded by white people, a part of him still expects someone to ask him politely to leave. It is a thing he could never mention to his daughters or even his wife. They would laugh at him and accuse him of making it up. Yet it is a thing he feels: he is an intruder in his own land, condemned to arriving at places where he will never quite belong.

He’s never understood the workings of the house. The fact is it was never his house, but hers, handed down from her father. While he was there on good behaviour. Which is why he thinks he chose bad behaviour.

Each time, the house is less built. Is it that he is going further back in time? Is he going backwards the more he runs? If so then when will he stop? What is he aimed at? He stands on the large concrete slab in the middle of nowhere and ponders this, and eventually he sits.

It is not so much that he is dead. It is more that no one appears to have been born. They still have their whole lives ahead of them. Nothing that needs to be undone has yet been done.

“The first thing I saw on getting back from boarding school,” he says, “was a black puppy, playing in the garden, chewing a rubber ball to bits. The second was Grace, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As our love grew, that dog in the garden was growing too. My love and your fear, they grew together. And now, I can no longer separate them. When I think of one, I see the other. I see that double thing, that creature—the beast. Circling the garden, dripping blood.”

“No one knows what I saw.”

Beauty seems to say this with the knowledge that this statement, for the first time, is no longer true: two others now know what she saw. What she saw no longer belongs to her: it will become a part of the general story that is used to define her sister.

She had come to think of Beauty as her friend and she thought she knew everything there was to know about her—but, of course, that was only vanity, or laziness, or wishful thinking.

Nothing has ever come back to her. Everything around her—and much that has been happening in the country at large has only confirmed this—has only ever held evidence of loss or decay.

But recently she has also been observing all the new buildings starting up out of the earth, and the green crops of weeds appearing in the most improbable places. A few days ago, when she and Bheki were driving into the village, she noticed a cloud of yellow butterflies hovering around the weeds and spilling over across their path. Bheki drove on through them as though they weren’t there, and neither of them said a word about it, but in that instant Patricia saw that there was an altogether different way of viewing the world: as an inexhaustible source of renewal and growth.

As they labour along the road, the image of the black puppy keeps finding its way back into her head: the way it would run along the fence of the dog-run after the girls going toward the dairy, stumbling over its paws, while she sat back and laughed at it.

“Beauty – please. You have to tell me the truth.”

“But he said they loved each other desperately,” she says. “He said she was good.”

The world hangs in the air like the word ‘truth’: simply as another way of presenting oneself to the world.

“She had nothing,” Beauty continues, “and uBass—he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.”

“She was trying to survive?”

Patricia has to repeat the phrase in English in order to accept it fully.

“Mesis,” she says, “you must find the truth for yourself.”