This Room Is Made of Noise

by Stephen Schottenfeld

Overview

While trying to drum up additional work, down-on-his-luck handyman Don Lank spies an imitation Tiffany lamp shining in the front window of a house. He offers the elderly widow who answers the door $800 for it—knowing he can sell it to a dealer for several hundred dollars more than that. Only the lamp turns out to be real—and worth at least $15,000. 

Feeling both delighted by and guilty about his good fortune, Don returns most of the money to the original owner, Millie Prall. He also offers to make a few repairs around her deteriorating house—making it easier and safer for her to navigate the space in the wake of her husband's death. As Millie’s dementia worsens, Don finds his life more and more enmeshed with hers, driving her to medical appointments, shopping for her groceries, cooking her meals, handling her finances, and increasingly overseeing her care—while simultaneously trying to repair his relationships with his father, his ex-wife, and his stepkids.

In this quietly mesmerizing novel, no one, including the protagonist, is ever entirely sure of their motivations. Existing in the liminal spaces between altruism and greed, This Room Is Made of Noise deftly explores the shades of gray that lie between our desires and our demons.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299341343
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Stephen Schottenfeld, associate professor of English at the University of Rochester, is the author of Bluff City Pawn. His stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the New England Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. 

Editorial Reviews

05/08/2023

A middle-aged man befriends an elderly woman in the nuanced latest from Schottenfeld (Bluff City Pawn). Don Lank, broke and divorced, supplements his handyman work by selling antique lamps. Millie Prall, 94, has what Don assumes is a Tiffany knockoff in her window, and he offers to buy it for $800, knowing the replicas also have value. She accepts, and he later discovers the lamp is an original Tiffany Lily, worth $15,000. Feeling guilty, he decides to share much of the profit with Millie, who later calls Don and asks him to make repairs around her large house. As Don considers the collapse of his marriage and his failed relationship with his father, he also makes a commitment to Millie’s care. Millie is hospitalized after a fall and her dementia worsens. She’s then admitted to a nursing home, where Don is overwhelmed by seeing Millie crying and the staff’s lack of response to her emotion, as if her “sadness meant nothing.” As the story progresses, Don deflects suspicions from Millie’s long-lost niece after Millie gives him power of attorney and announces she’s changed her will, leading both to assume he’s the benefactor, and ultimately must confront his own fears about his motives for helping Millie. Don’s reflections on his past heartache tend to throttle the story’s momentum, but Schottenfeld shines in his well-wrought depiction of Millie’s decline. This morality tale is worth a look. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Everything you want in a novel: exquisitely imagined, big-hearted, full of grace, with unforgettable characters you will laugh with, cry with, and root for. Schottenfeld has given us a beautiful story for our times—a room you will want to settle in and think of as home.”—Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth

“A tightly calibrated tale of isolation and connection. As he proved in his first novel, Stephen Schottenfeld writes about work—the dailiness of it, the paycheck of it, the way it slowly and inevitably shapes a life—with an authority few contemporary novelists can match. This is realistic fiction that manages to depict the hopes and the failings, the self-deception and the grace, of recognizable human characters—our fellow citizens—with a vividness that both illuminates and elevates, perhaps even unites.”—Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour

“A marvel—a book that somehow manages to be both tense and comforting, brainy and plainspoken. A book that is calm on the surface but underneath there is a strong current of mystery. Is the narrator what he seems? Is the widow? Are we to trust either of them? Are we to trust anyone, even—or especially—ourselves? This is a wonderful book, full of pain and pleasure, despair and hope—full of life, in other words.”—Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

“Nuanced. . . . Schottenfeld shines in his well-wrought depiction of Millie’s decline. [A] morality tale.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher