Situated on an incline in Echo Park, Michelle Huneven’s house is cozy in all the right ways: Kilim rugs, an invitingly plush couch, a kitchen that is used for more than just putting on the coffee. But something is amiss. Huneven is a novelist, a journalist and a lecturer in creative writing at UCLA, so where are all the books? Gone in the Eaton fire, it turns out. Huneven lost two homes in the deadly conflagration last January. Her insurance company is paying for this Echo Park rental while she and her husband, an environmental lawyer, inch toward building a new house on their property.
“Some friends of ours in Altadena showed up at 6 p.m. the night of the fire, thinking that it would be safe at our place,” says Huneven. “Then the lights went out.” By 4:30 in the morning, Huneven and her husband were forced to abandon their house, which, along with a home they used as a rental, burned to the ground.
“I’ve got a lot of processing going on, but a lot of it is being done unconsciously,” says Huneven, who is preoccupied with trying to negotiate the state’s Kafkaesque laws to rebuild her home at the same time that her new novel, “Bug Hollow,” is being published. “There are a thousand bureaucratic details to deal with, like applying for a [Small Business Administration] loan, and you can’t concentrate on anything else, because you get a call in the middle of the night asking you to attend a meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers the next day. With all this going on, I forget that I have a book coming out.”
The Samuelsons, the middle-class Altadena family at the heart of Huneven’s novel, are also confronted with crises at every turn, negotiating the vicissitudes of modern life across decades with hard-won grace. But “Bug Hollow” is not another novel about family dysfunction, secrets and lies. Rather, Huneven’s bighearted family is bound together by the power of love, and doing right by each other. In that way, “Bug Hollow” (out June 17) is of a piece with Huneven’s previous work, in which seemingly incompatible characters reach out across social and cultural divides in a bid to grasp some measure of redemption and comity. Her 1997 debut, “Round Rock,” gathers a small group of burnouts in a halfway house in the Santa Bernita Valley as they try to repair the wreckage of their lives. In 2003’s “Jamesland,” three damaged souls living in Los Feliz find solace in one another’s company, disparate lives connected by empathy and compassion.
Huneven, who was born and raised in Altadena, finds herself circling back to the same familiar patch of land in her fiction. “Altadena is in my DNA and it’s always been,” she says. “Full of artists, spiritual seekers and soreheads. I know the flora and fauna and many of the trails. Why look farther afield when there’s enough choice material to write about, even on my own property, which was once home to the nurseryman who brought the Fuerte avocado to America.”
Huneven’s new book, her sixth, didn’t come easy. “I initially wanted to write short stories but I didn’t have any ideas,” says Huneven. She is sitting on the deck of her rental home, which offers a view of the Hollywood sign in the near distance. “When I teach fiction, I give a lot of prompts to my students. I printed up all my prompts, 126 of them, and went through all of them in order to jump-start some ideas.”
Huneven methodically worked through nearly 50 prompts, but nothing good came to her. Then, she stumbled upon the following: “Write about a sibling you never had.” “My mother had an uncle Ellis who drowned, and if she had a boy, I was to be named for him,” she says. Huneven wrote a story about Ellis and showed it to her first reader, novelist Mona Simpson. “She wanted to know more about Ellis’ girlfriend, so I wrote that.” That story begat others, which became the foundation for “Bug Hollow.” Huneven slowly fashioned a larger arc from bits and pieces of other stories, until she had created a full-bodied, cohesive narrative.
Unlike so many sprawling family sagas, “Bug Hollow” is taut and compressed; the novel jumps across time and space in short, sharp chapters stripped of sentiment. “I drew from Alice Munro because she swerves and time-jumps,” says Huneven. “I’ve learned a lot from her; I teach her a lot.”
In “Bug Hollow,” Ellis is the only son of Phil and Sybil Samuelson. Ellis, a venturesome dreamer with a promising academic future, drowns during the summer before college. His girlfriend, Julia, gives birth to their daughter soon after. Phil and Syb decide to adopt the child, despite the fact that Syb, a middle-school teacher, derives far more satisfaction from teaching her students than tending to her own children.
It is this lack of maternal attention that sends Ellis’ two older sisters on different paths, with the same goal in mind: to fill the lacuna left by their mother’s benign neglect. Sally moves to the southern Sierra Nevada Foothills and has an unrequited love affair with a married stonemason, while Katie is drawn to the medical profession, to the rational side of her nature — the side she can control.
“A lot of what happens between Syb and her daughters is taken from my background,” says Huneven, whose mother was an elementary school teacher in the Pasadena Unified School District. Her father, whom she calls a “working-class English German mutt,” was an attendance counselor for LAUSD. “I was a total misfit in my family, in that I was creative and I cared about how things looked. And I was a crazy reader.”
Huneven’s mother was a fierce critic whose métier was the unprovoked insult. “My mother would just cut me and my sister down to size, ya know? And that’s a very unstable feeling, to have your mother suddenly tell you that you stink, you should use deodorant.” In contrast, “Bug Hollow’s” Phil Samuelson is a sturdy, calming influence — the conciliator who brings a measure of stability when things get sticky with Syb. “I love Phil,” says Huneven. “I want Phil to be my father.”
The three Samuelson girls, including Ellis’ child, Eva, pass through different versions of their lives, as so many of us do, trying on and shedding identities. While Katie and Eva turn toward more conventional career paths, Sally, who displays an artistic temperament early on, persists in pursuing a career in art — an outlier in a family of ambitious careerists. It’s a choice Huneven understands all too well, having worked as a restaurant critic and freelance journalist before selling her first novel, “Round Rock.”
“Pursuing art as a life choice was something I wanted to explore,” says Huneven. “In a family where there are ambitious children who want to be psychologists or doctors, the artistic life is frowned upon, like it’s a stupid thing to do. But you can’t get anything done artistically without some naivete.”
As someone who makes a living from her art, Huneven now finds herself torn between two jobs: doing all she can to move along her home rebuilding project while also promoting “Bug Hollow.” “Obviously it’s been difficult, but we’ve had a soft landing compared to others,” she says. “My students have been so generous, as have our friends. We are very fortunate to have a community behind us. Everyone needs that.”