"Infinte Home" by Kathleen Alcott is Interminable with Clots but not Lots of Brilliance

Kathleen Alcott's (b Amer 1988)  "Six Shorts" was a finalist for the Time EFG Short Story Prize (2017).  "Infinite Home" is novel with insightful & ardent characters struggling to find relevance in their lives in a world that is deteriorating and shutting down.  Edith is the landlord of a small tenement building in Brooklyn with a ragtag mix of misfit tenants.  She charges modest rent and offers solace with tea & sympathy.  The title "Infinite House" is mingled in towards the end of the novel in a flashback to when Edith & her new husband first moved into what was then a sturdy structure with vacant apartments.  Edith always lived in cramped family space exclaims with awe "All these rooms with no one living in them yet, begging for life and the tread of people in this infinite house."  Time moves on and the decaying of the building parallels Edith's grasp on reality as she succumbs to the ravages of senility.  Her husband has long since passed, her beloved daughter Jenny ran away to the Haight in the 60's and her aloof son Owen has returned demonically devising to commit Edith and evict the few tenants that have found a haven in these tenement spaces.  Those who have taken up habitat fear becoming bereft & adrift.  The boarders are all in varying states of mental welfare & sanity.   Those who have taken up shelter include Adeline, an agoraphobic hoarder, Thomas an artist who suffers a physically & socially debilitating stroke, Edward a down & out former rising comic/screenwriter and Claudia who abandons her husband to care for her beloved brother Paulie born with the mental & physical disorder Williams Syndrome.  As a young boy Paulie's loving father laments "...the unbearable length of his son's life - the life in which he would always be a child."  Edward rightfully blames himself for destroying the loving relationship he cherished.  "He had gone to great lengths to test the limits of her love, and dared her to fail, and then she had."  Each of the characters' stories might have lent an interesting short story but comingled they meandered morosely into fruitless (but for the quest to see the firefly phenomena) sojourns.   Alcott artfully measures the evidence of one's existence and signs of approaching obsolescence.  Thomas notes that little seconds often combine and become something of worth.  The opulence of wisdom & awe break through Edith in moments of sterling clarity; unforunately a rarity.  Edith coaxes Adeline to venture forth in life "You'll never see the way your skeletons can dance.  Not if you keep them to yourself.  You've gotta let those bones twist!  Even in the dimness."   My fondness for the dysfunctional assembled family born of proximity in a world where most live graceful & productive lives floundered.  Although, as Edith proclaims "It's not your job to say why someone loves you."