The Irresistible Henry House: A Novel

Henry is an orphan who was provided to a local college to serve as a practice baby for their home economics program. The young women in the classes, supervised by prim teacher Martha, will learn proper child-rearing techniques; then Henry will be returned to the orphanage to be adopted. But in this case, Henry ends up staying. What are the effects of being raised as a human guinea pig in a simulacrum of reality? That's the question this book seeks to answer.

Author Lisa Grunwald certainly found an interesting premise for her book and the postwar Baby Boom era in which the novel is set provides a lot of material. Her assessment of the kind of narcissism and detachment that would result are pretty consistent with what we now know about how show more important early childhood attachments are for development. I would have liked more about the conflict between the strict, mechanistic parenting style recommended by early 20th century experts and the revolutionary changes made by Dr. Spock and his contemporaries. I think that would have made it a little more clear why Martha was singularly unsuited to be a mother substitute for a boy who was experiencing so much rejection already, and why she couldn't recognize this until it was too late.

I enjoyed Grunwald's writing style, and even a late detour into the Disney animation studios of the 1960s which might have seemed superfluous was well done. A diverting read. show less

I adored this, although I thought the end was a teensy bit weak. But it's one of those books that is so breezy and fun to read that until you're sobbing or laughing hysterically, you have no idea what a strong effect it really has. Poor Martha. I ached for her.

Great book on parenting, attachment, mothering, adoption, and loss.

This is a strange one, a book that is chocked full of interesting plot points, but that lacks any likable characters. Henry House is a practice baby provided by a local orphanage for a small Pennsylvania women’s college in the 1940s. This is something that really happened from 1919 to 1969; orphans were used in home economic courses to help teach young women how to care for babies.

Martha runs the practice house where Henry lives and eventually becomes his mother. We also find out who his real mother is and we see Henry live a Goldilocks-style life, with one mother too old to understand him and the other too young to care for him properly. Henry spends his whole life watching anyone he loves eventually leave him. Because of this show more he’s unable to form any real connections with people.

At one point Martha compares Henry’s upbringing to that of the rhesus monkeys that were experimented on. They were given wire “mothers” that dispensed milk and cloth “mothers.” The monkeys preferred the cloth surrogate mothers, but in the end they all went mad because they had no real mother, no real caregiver. It’s a dark and disturbing thought coming from the woman who is supposed to be his “mother.”

We follow Henry throughout his childhood and early adulthood, watching the world change around him in dramatic ways. The book is almost reminiscent of Forrest Gump in the fact that we see dozens of major events and famous people cross paths with Henry in one way or another. There’s a mini history lesson on each page and that was by far my favorite aspect of the novel.

BOTTOM LINE: Worth reading if you’re curious about the history of using practice babies or about Disney animators. The writing style reminds me a lot of John Irving – even when you don't like the characters the story is still quirky and compulsively readable, but it leaves me feeling dissatisfied. I think I would have preferred a nonfiction book on the subject to this.

“If he had no one, he figured, he would have no one to lose.” show less

Another book with a really promising start and a disappointing ending. I loved the first chapters, even if they did make me want another baby, but I started disliking Henry more and more the older he got, and by the end I was getting awfully tired of him bedding every woman within a ten-mile radius. And I was totally put off by the way he treated poor Martha. Yes, I get it, she lied to you. She also showered love on you for years and did her absolute best to raise you properly. So now that she's dying of cancer, you could maybe get over yourself a little bit, Henry. The fact that I am still ticked off at a fictional character two days after finishing the book is probably a tribute to Lisa Grunwald's skill as a writer. But I think I show more disliked him more than she really intended me to, and it's difficult for me to imagine he would ever make a good life partner. Run, Mary Jane! Run like the wind! show less

The late 1040's and 1950's evoke proper housewifely images like Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, vaccuuming in heels and pearls. Although this was a Hollywood constructed image, achieving a near likeness to it was certainly the plan of the day. And doing so did not come easy. Quite a few colleges across the US offered young women home economics courses to teach them to be good wives and mothers through hands-on experience. The invented midwestern Wilton College in Grunwald's novel is one of those. Main character Henry House, borrowed from a local orphanage, was a "practice baby," intended to be lent to the program for two years of raising by a group of young, enthusiastic women learning to be mothers.

Martha Gaines, the house show more matron, ran a tight ship and subscribed to the very strict methods of child rearing about to be eclipsed by Dr. Sears' more gentle and loving approach. But Henry, at 6 weeks old, comes to a practice house at a time when babies are still tightly scheduled and cared for but not lavished with love. There is, as the title suggests, something irrestible about this baby and even the bitter, widowed matron comes to love Henry, craving his love in return, eventually lobbying to be allowed to keep Henry and raise him in the practice house as her own son.

As sought after as Henry is (and will continue to be for his entire life), he is emotionally stunted, marked by an inability to make connections with others, and incapable of not only fulfilling the needs of others but also of even wanting another person until or unless she is emotionally inaccessible to him. Being raised by so many mothers who must, of necessity, graduate and move on in their own lives, taught Henry that everything in life is transitory, fleeting. The desperate love of his "mother," matron Martha Gaines, comes too late and too threaded through with untruths about his beginnings for its depth and permanence to have an impact on Henry's emotional life. Being a "practice baby" completely defined Henry.

As he moves from childhood to adulthood, his search to belong somewhere continues through his efforts with his birth mother, his work as an animator at Disney, his move to 1960's London to be a part of The Beatles' The Yellow Submarine, and his eventual homecoming to the States. As he moves through each of these times in his life, he continually reenacts the heady infatuation, easy conquest, and abandonment of his infancy and early childhood. But instead of being the object of this, he inflicts this destructive cycle on the women in his life. And yet, he remains a sympathetic character, if not quite the irresistible one of the title.

The times and places of Henry's life are rendered in vivid and accurate detail. The secondary characters who swirl around him are fully realized, or as fully realized as they ever are to Henry, and human. If some of the plot threads are unfinished and abandonned, it is because that is how Henry, in his emotionally stunted development, leaves them. The story reinforces the idea that early childhood is vital in character formation, acknowledges that nature and nurture both play important roles, and highlights the damage that can be done, even inadvertantly, without love. With a unique and fascinating premise, I thoroughly enjoyed this well written novel. show less

Another book with a really promising start and a disappointing ending. I loved the first chapters, even if they did make me want another baby, but I started disliking Henry more and more the older he got, and by the end I was getting awfully tired of him bedding every woman within a ten-mile radius. And I was totally put off by the way he treated poor Martha. Yes, I get it, she lied to you. She also showered love on you for years and did her absolute best to raise you properly. So now that she's dying of cancer, you could maybe get over yourself a little bit, Henry. The fact that I am still ticked off at a fictional character two days after finishing the book is probably a tribute to Lisa Grunwald's skill as a writer. But I think I show more disliked him more than she really intended me to, and it's difficult for me to imagine he would ever make a good life partner. Run, Mary Jane! Run like the wind! show less

Henry (House) Gaines was a practice baby. Born in 1946, given up for adoption by his unmarried teen-aged mother, he became a "House" baby in a university Home economics program where he was "raised" by a procession of young women majoring in home economics.

Today, our high school students often carry 10 pound sacks of flour, diapered and dressed in baby clothes which they must "care for" for a period of days/weeks/months--an assignment designed to impress on young people some of the limits and responsibilities parenthood imposes on parental time and freedom of movement. Some of today's high schools even have robot or mechanical 'babies' programmed to cry, wet, burp, sleep, etc. But in 1906, when Cornell University instituted the idea of show more a Practice House, and contracted with a local orphanage to care for practice babies, the concept was quite radical. It subsequently spread to many colleges across the country and continued well into the 1960's.

Lisa Grunwald gives us a fictionalized account of one such experiment. Henry was only 6 weeks old when he came to live in the House. Martha Gaines, the house mother, is a stern widow who goes strictly by the book of no-nonsense child rearing. Babies were fed on schedule, bathed, walked, and dressed on time, with no cuddling, picking up, soothing allowed. After all, if a child learned he could cry and get picked up, then he would cry all the time! Each class of 8 student mothers rotated living in the house for a week at a time for one or two semesters of 'child-rearing'.

So Henry was "Raised, as a consequence, not with a pack of orphans by a single matron but as a single orphan by a pack of mothers....(he) started life in a fragrant, dust-free, fractured world where love and disappointment were both excessive and intertwined." (pg. 7)

Martha did not allow emotional bonding with the babies, either for herself, or her students. Somehow, Henry didn't get the message, and Martha found herself falling in love with this particular infant. One of the other practice moms also exhibited a special attachment to Henry.

Without spoilers, this is the story of Henry's life...how he came to stay in the practice house beyond the normal one year limit and be raised by Martha as her son. How he came to use her last name. How the lack of a male role model, and the constant need to please a number of women impacted his emotional life as he grew. How his search for, and subsequent relationship with, his birth mother colored his perceptions of parenting. It is the story of Henry, from his birth to his ultimate assimilation as a young adult into the drug culture of the sixties, of his adult relationships with his mother(s) and with young women his own age, of his life as an graphic artist both in Hollywood and London, and his search for permanence in his family setting.

Ultimately, I saw this book as an indictment of an experiment, as the story not just of Henry, but a study of the need for permanent bonding relationships of infants and parents, of one human with another, and of the need for trust to be established and honored. Grunwald has given us an extraordinary picture of human relationships, and of the universal need to belong to a family.

Henry's story is well told, and well worth reading. show less