We Still Have the Telephone

Both moving and deeply funny, 'We Still Have the Telephone' illuminates Van Horn's long-practised miniaturist skills as an artist and her ethnographic curiosity as a writer. In this mosaic of a singular everywoman, Van Horn describes a life laid out in detail, quietly registering the fuzziness of the line between eccentricity and madness: the Second World War exists on a par with plastic straws; immutable rituals with an irrepressible anarchy; and fragments of a multigenerational chronicle with anecdotes of sometimes-strange tokens of maternal love.