Book Review: The Rooming House Gallery
The Rooming House Gallery: Connecting the Dots. Bill Mathis. Rogue Phoenix Press, June 8, 2020, Trade Paperback and E-book, 236 pages.
Reviewed by David Steven Rappoport.
The Rooming House Gallery: Connecting the Dots is an engaging follow-up companion to The Rooming House Diaries: Life, Love & Secrets, Mathis’ novel published last year. Like Diaries, Mathis built Gallery on the same premise as Elmer Rice's famous play Street Scene—the lives of residents of the same building. Unlike Diaries, which was also a social history of Chicago, Gallery has a compressed timeline in the recent past. Yet at its best, Gallery becomes a sort of contemporary Canterbury Tales or Decameron in that there’s a strong focus on storytelling.
Manny Rodriguez, a gay Hispanic man who is disabled from childhood abuse and a significant character in Diaries, is dying.
He informs his visiting nephew, Andres, and his partner, Josh, that they will inherit a property Manny owns—an old rooming house. After Manny's death, they move in, and the century-old saga of 4822 South Justine continues with the building now transforming into a community art gallery.
As in the previous volume, Mathis’ narrative is a delight to read. The writing rarely lags, and the large and diverse group of characters is artfully handled. The tale of Andres’ mother, Bella Briseno Rodriguez, is particularly engaging. An illegal immigrant seduced and left pregnant by an unscrupulous man, Bella manipulates events that force him to marry her, teaches herself English from her son's library books, and builds a life for herself and her son in the midst of a bitter marriage.
The book has one area for improvement. The central structural narrative—Andres’s and Josh’s struggle with the building—isn’t as engaging as the stories of characters such as Bella Briseno Rodriguez. Perhaps in the future, Mathis will write a novel that models more closely on the Decameron or Canterbury Tales, thus focusing more fully on his great strength of storytelling. Meanwhile, The Rooming House Gallery: Connecting the Dots will delight Mathis fans and make him many new ones.