In this overstuffed satire of family, female friendships and property values, characters over-bond with the houses they inhabit.
Reviewed by Allan Fallow
The Stager
A Novel by Susan Coll
Home stager or elephant tamer? That’s the question Susan Coll raises when her protagonist, Eve Brenner, agrees to stage a 6,200-square-foot white elephant for rapid sale in the offbeat, shelter-driven novel The Stager.
After losing her job editing the glossy monthly MidAtlantic Home, Eve reinvents herself as a home stager—a so-called dream job (“Get paid to depersonalize!”) that Coll takes pains to deglamorize: “There’s a lot of emotional volatility involved in selling, never mind staging, a house,” Eve discovers. “Homeowners have been known to burst into tears and/or verbally abuse the stager.”
Eve enters just such a psychological vortex when she finds herself in the “occasional, less-lucrative-than-it-should-be employ” of her neighbor Amanda Hoffstead, “one of the most successful independent REALTORS® in the Washington, D.C., region”:
[Amanda] worked hard, reading the obituaries and pouncing on homes, talking up and befriending strangers in the grocery-store line, and handing out cards. She did her homework, paying close attention to houses that were languishing on the market and then swooping in for the relist.
Certain upheavals in her own life—including a divorce from her husband of 30 years—moved Coll to write The Stager, she confided to Jasmine Elist for the L. A. Times: “The idea for the book stemmed from my own experience selling my house. The REALTOR® insisted that I bring in a stager to make it ready for sale.”
The Magic of Staging
In these pages, Eve—the fictional incarnation of that change agent—discovers that her background in art and journalism makes her a natural at her new job: Had she been put on this earth, Eve wonders, “to repair the world through interior design?” As a newly minted maestro of makeover magic, Eve performs classic stager tricks:
- Paint the front door red (“In some cultures it means the mortgage has been paid,” Eve says.);
- Move abstract art and antiques to the attic (the one too eclectic, the other too incongruous);
- Heed the Rule of Three (cluster asymmetrical objects in trios on surfaces);
- Clear the kitchen countertops (goodbye, high-end small appliances);
- Kill that hideous odor wafting from the basement.
Eve must summon all her staging chops, and props, to paper over the flaws in a “cruise-ship McMansion” whose open house is just five days away. To blame for the time crunch is the house’s current occupant, Belladonna (symbolism alert!) Sorkin, who is moving to England to become the high-profile “Vice President for Transparency” of Luxum, a shady multinational. Bella’s 10-year-old daughter, Elsa, digs in her bratty heels in response—“I don’t want to move to London and no one has even asked my opinion about this”—but Bella and her husband, washed-up Swedish tennis star Lars Jorgenson, have already signed a contract for “a multimillion-dollar home in North London, steps from Hampstead Heath.” The couple will be “raking in big bucks, [but] their resources were elastic only to a point. They needed rather urgently to get their cash out of the Maryland ground.”
Alpha Female
To help them engineer this extraction, The Stager resorts to a multi-narrator format that had me eager to witness events through the eyes of alpha female and industrial-strength narcissist Bella. The woman’s charm has a deliciously cutthroat feel:
She is one of those wonder women [muses Lars] you read about in magazines, the kind who pumped breast milk while writing prize-winning articles on deadline, who managed, once, to get from a conference in Tokyo to Elsa’s field-hockey game in some remote Maryland suburb just in time, who shepherded her mother through the end stages of dementia while working full-time.
And, wouldn’t you know it, Bella is also drop-dead gorgeous: “What I found most inspiring about Bella Sorkin,” admits Eve, “wasn’t her beauty—although she was striking in an unconventional way, a newsroom Modigliani with her crooked nose and hazel eyes that didn’t quite match, everything just slightly, perfectly, askew—it was that she looked like she belonged…wherever she happened to be.”
Frenemies
Although Bella won’t learn the identity of her home’s stager until the novel’s climactic scene, in their early years the two women shared a lopsided friendship—and a traumatic event—that has taken Eve from Bella’s confidante to enabler to frenemy. “Vince once suggested that I was obsessed with Bella,” Eve quotes her own ex-husband. “But Vince was wrong, or he simply didn’t understand the bonds of female friendship.” (I found Eve’s final act of “revenge” to be utterly justified but inexcusably lenient.)
Coll’s misguided decision to exclude Bella from the book’s lineup of first-person relators (an apt anagram of “REALTORS®”) leaves us in the clutches of some decidedly unreliable narrators—chief among them Bella’s husband, Lars, “a formerly handsome man who has become too round” with the passing years. Having blown out his knee in a semifinal tournament decades ago, Lars hopes for nothing more from the London move than to retain his ebbing sanity with a mix of pharmaceuticals Coll clearly had fun inventing: There can’t really be antidepressants named Zaxivon and Zumlexitor, can there? (Smashing all sorts of hallowed “fourth walls,” the novelist also makes omniscience a side effect of the man’s many medications.)
Left behind when her parents jet off to oversee the remodeling of their new digs—two skylights or three?—fifth-grader Elsa likewise struggles beneath her heavy narrative load. A precocious and “chunky” tween (she blows off her field-hockey laps by pretending she needs her inhaler), Elsa melodramatically acts out her anxiety about the impending move. She “accidentally” spills white flour and red paint inside their “perverted Tudor” of a house; lets her pet rabbit, Dominique, indulge its appetite for costly carpeting; mouths off to her nanny, Nabila; and weirdly fixates on Eve: “[T]his is kind of embarrassing,” Elsa confesses, but “I feel jealous about Vince, because I want to be the Stager’s friend and … well, I want her not to have other friends.”
There probably hasn’t been a book this realty-centric since Philistines at the Hedgerow, the 1998 Steven Gaines exposé of “passion and property in the Hamptons.” And if The Stager feels, well, a little too tidily staged (“I have a tendency of over-plotting,” Coll once allowed), the novel is certain to make you envy the truth-telling cleverness of a 10-year-old: “Amanda is the REALTOR®… She always dresses perfectly. Her business card says Amanda Hoffstead Always Cinches the Deal! We are all afraid of Amanda, but my mother says that her being intimidating is possibly a good thing: maybe people will be frightened into buying our house this time around.”
Fingers crossed, then—and all personal items stowed, please!
