Rudder Grange
1879
Frank R. Stockton wrote the kind of comedy that sneaks up on you. A newly married couple, sick of boarding house life and its endless indignities, make a radical decision: they will live on a canal boat. Not as a vacation. Not as a quirky experiment. They move in, furnish it, name it (the agonizing deliberations over 'Rudder Grange' are a masterclass in comic overkill), and attempt to run a household on the water. The husband narrates with the earnest befuddlement of a man who believes himself to be completely reasonable, while his long-suffering wife Euphemia questions every decision but goes along anyway. When they take in a boarder, their domestic tranquility faces its greatest threat yet. Stockton's genius lies in treating the utterly absurd with complete seriousness, finding the comedy in genuine human aspiration and the quiet desperation of wanting a home that fits. It's a window into late 19th-century American life, but one filtered through a sensibility closer to S.J. Perelman than Henry James.
