House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus III

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Part 1, Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

A real estate appraiser informs Behrani that his house is worth four times more than his original investment. Nadi, who celebrates this news by drinking champagne, invites him into their bedroom to make love “for only the third time in the years [they] have lived in America” (69). After Nadi falls asleep, Behrani wanders the house, thinking of his daughter, whose growth and marriage make him melancholy. Outside the house he sees a parked red Bonneville and discovers a woman—Kathy, although he is unaware of her identity—sleeping within. He returns to the house puzzling over “how these American women live” (71).

Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary

Kathy awakes from a dream in which she pled with Nick to have children. From her car, she registers two carpenters (who Behrani has hired to install a widow’s walk) working on the bungalow’s roof. She confronts the carpenters, telling them to stop working on her house. The carpenters tell her to talk to the new owners. As she walks back to her car, Kathy pierces her bare foot on a stay piece of roofing. One of workers helps her inside the house, where Nadi rushes to help clean the wound. Kathy is too taken aback by the strangeness of the situation to confront her.

Kathy then drives to Connie’s office to complain about the construction. Connie cautions Kathy not to return to the house but presents her with some optimistic news: The county has a record of Kathy and Nick paying the tax they used to justify seizing her property. Kathy tells Connie about the new owners, and Connie promises to get in touch with them. Kathy leaves and drives around aimlessly before deciding to visit Lester.

Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary

Behrani is mowing the lawn, feeling satisfied with his investment and how it has brought his family together. One of the carpenters tells Behrani about the woman who hurt herself and claimed to be the house’s real owner. While attempting to hide his shock, Behrani asks the carpenters to inform him if she returns.

Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary

Kathy waits in her car outside the San Mateo Sheriff's Office, hoping to see Lester. As she is about to give up on waiting, Lester approaches her, happy but surprised, and the two arrange to meet for coffee a few hours later.

Though Kathy shows up late to the diner, Lester is nowhere to be found. She waits in the parking lot, leaves, and drives around aimlessly before returning, having nothing better to do. Lester finally shows up, and Kathy gets into his car. She asks Lester about his profession before he asks about her marriage, and the two begin to kiss.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

8,800+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,700+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

Lester drives them to a motor lodge, where he rents a room for Kathy and offers her a beer. Kathy informs him of her sobriety and he apologizes, dumping his own can down the drain. The two start kissing again and prepare to make love.

Part 1, Chapters 7-10 Analysis

These chapters encompass several of the novel’s most important encounters: Kathy’s introduction to the Behranis, her decision to pursue Lester, and the sexual reunion of Massoud and Nadereh Behrani. The latter, which occurs after a night celebrating Massoud’s purchase of the house, offers an important bit of imagery when Nadi’s passion in the present causes Behrani to recall their wedding night, when his father carried “a fat sheep to the doorway of [their] new home,” and the violence of that sheep’s death as his father “pushed the blade deep into the sheep’s throat” (69). This juxtaposition of sexual pleasure and slaughter foreshadows the violence that follows Lester and Kathy’s sexual relationship, which ultimately results in the death of Esmail—who is himself the product of Nadi and Behrani’s sexual relationship.

Chapter 10 describes the beginning of Lester and Kathy’s romantic relationship, which inspires the violence at the novel’s climax. This chapter also features some important discussion of perception, first when Kathy asks Lester whether he, as a police officer, ever gets used to “[people] you don’t know being scared of you” (88), and later just before they have sex, when Kathy says, “You have no idea who I am” (92). In these scenes Lester and Kathy are depicted as opaque surfaces upon which others project their fears, anxieties, and desires. This sort of misperception also happens in Chapter 8, when Kathy mistakenly identifies the Behranis as Arab and Nadi assumes that Kathy is the carpenter’s girlfriend. These cases of mistaken identity and misperception seem minor at this point in the novel, but they establish a pattern of misidentification that later results in tragedy.