The Pleasures of Wonder: Mariam Petrosyan’s The Gray House

This imagined world is far from being a perfect world, however. The more insightful among the children know that the House is not a thing apart. “The Outsides . . . contained the House in it.” Indeed, the divisions and the fights among the leaders of the House reflect the wars and the massacres of the world outside. A game of chess is played as a battle between two armies. Playing dirty tricks and scaring and beating up the newbies is the seniors’ favorite entertainment. The newbies are disciplined, chain-walked, and forced to eat, sleep, and pee on schedule, just as the grown-ups in the Outsides follow the Rules and Regulations of their own Script.

And then, of course, there is the Sepulcher, “a house within the House,” where patients are kept, and where Death, “a small, tender boy, with eyes occupying a good half of his face, and long dark-red hair that looked varnished . . . was a permanent resident.”

Petrosyan’s is a masterful parody of the care patients receive in “the godforsaken real world.” Her critique of the inhumane treatment of the deranged and the disabled, in “the empty and hostile city that lived its own life,” cannot be missed. “They pump you full of drugs and pack you off in a straitjacket,” she writes. In the words of one youngster, “There is no trace of humanity in the Sepulcher . . . The human floats somewhere outside of the boundaries of the patient, waiting patiently for the possibility of a resurrection.”

Despite the obvious overlaps, however, the Game played in the Gray House is not the same evil drama as the one played in the Outsides. No matter what their abnormality, the kids in the House are neither pitied, nor shunned and excluded. Spells and amulets work (even if not all of the time) and magic caters to their fears and their wishes. The Great Power makes the armless little boy we encounter at the beginning of the book, “whole” with arms. Whether these are prosthetic or metaphoric arms does not even matter. Indeed, the armless boy wonders if arms are something that everyone needs: “I could choose to have them or not have them,” he tells his friend Ancient, the smartest guy in the House.

Under the guise of a fantastical tale, Petrosyan makes us ponder the inner workings of human nature and the societies in which we live. While she is entertaining us with the particularities of her imagined world, she is also implicitly interrogating: “Why do we oppress and tyrannize?” “Where does this angst come from?” “Sepulcher: Outside or Inside Us.” These questions are left unanswered. Receiving the answers would be even more frightening. Smoker understands that there is “not a word of truth” in the promotional booklet that advertises the House as a Home, “but also not a word that was a direct lie.” Things remain enigmatic.

Maybe there is no perfect version of life. The craziness is all around. Yet, by confronting the disabilities of these children, Petrosyan creates the possibility of a viable life for them. We embrace the girl with “eyes too big for a small triangular space,” the kids with “big heads full of teeth,” and Humpback, who “laughed with only half of his face.” In the final chapter, the Happy Boy wakes up with this wondrous feeling: “I’m feeling kinda strange. Kinda liking everything, very much, so much I want to cry.” The joy overflowing inside the boy fills him with “an unexpected and unfamiliar delight . . . Nothing much would be able to offend him anymore.”