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The HomePort Journals
By A.C. Burch
Second Edition, HomePort Press, 2017
Five stars

I have happy memories of Provincetown from when I was young, and have been back a couple of times since—but not since our now-grown children were very small. The fact that A.C. Burch has chosen to center his book’s narrative on a fictitious Victorian mansion just makes it all the more appealing to me—a house nut for most of my life, and a career curator for a beer baron’s house in Newark, New Jersey. The importance of HomePort to Burch’s story possibly made me into a biased fan.

Marcus Nugent has run away—away from New York and from a relationship gone bad. The emerging details of his flight to Provincetown form a strong thread in the story’s complex, interwoven plotlines. The first important thing that happens to Marc is that he rescues Dorrie Machado’s groceries on a windswept rainy night. That single act of unselfish goodness opens a door—for Marc, and for the reader—into the world of HomePort, Gilded Age mansion of the seafaring Staunton family.

As Marc’s Provincetown story unfolds, we meet a bevy of important characters who pull emotional and narrative strings in the book. Lola Staunton seems to be the central character, and indeed she is the chatelaine of HomePort; but her near neighbor Dorrie Machado is, we eventually learn, just as important. Then there’s Helena Handbasket, the drag name of a young man who lives his life entirely in costume, nominally serving as Lola Staunton’s housekeeper. There are other characters, and each matters to the plot, as well as to Marcus’s life in Provincetown. Getting to know them is one of the great pleasures of reading this book.

It's been a long time since I read Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” but I kept thinking of it as I read “The HomePort Journals.” The big difference is that Lola is not a madwoman like poor Miss Havisham, and her mansion is neither neglected nor crumbling. However, the past is ever-present at HomePort, and all its denizens feel the pull of it. A lot of damage has been done to the people who live at HomePort, whether in the main house, or in the servants’ wing, nicknamed The Bates Motel. In the end, the people at HomePort become a makeshift family, and a conduit for something bigger than any one of them could imagine.

The very idea of a Victorian house having survived intact in the same family—whose fortune has also remained intact—is the stuff of which curator’s dreams are made of, and I went into this story with my own great expectations. Burch lives up to the promise his setting offers, and the reader is richly rewarded .