Goyen passes on traditional conventions of plot and character. The House of Breath is an address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in small Texas town, Charity. The novel is a meditation on the nature of identity and origins, memory, and time's annihilation of life. This is the restored version, going back to Goyen's originally published version from 1950 with an afterword from Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University and the former editor of TriQuarterly Magazine .