“Accidental, Sideways, All-Comers Kinship” in Leni Zumas’s Wolf Bells
Two aging former punk singers decide to turn a dilapidated mansion into an alternative to a nursing home. Wolf Bells is a response to the era of un-caring, with its crises of healthcare, housing, loneliness, and addiction. What if instead we took each other in?
Wolf Bells hits bookstores and libraries in September 2025.
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Before I started writing about Leni Zumas’s new novel Wolf Bells, I handed it to my good friend, a geriatrician. “It’s about an unconventional nursing home,” I told her. She devoured it over a couple of days, and among the other unnamed summer bestsellers in her stack, it was this story that stuck with her.
That’s partly due to the strong anti-ageist themes that emerge in Wolf Bells, but I think it’s also because these characters feel real; I could immediately hear their voices. Wolf Bells tells the story of a big old house and its incongruous residents, all of whom live there rent-free because two former punk rock stars, Caz and Vara, decided to experiment with a new ethos of care.
Caz and Vara have been friends for half a century and are themselves aging, but not everyone who lives in the house is old. The book opens with Caz evicting a young resident (she calls him “Neck Beard,” but not to his face) who isn’t holding up his end of the bargain. Caz’s rule is: as long as you help out with the sick and disabled residents, you can live in the house. I worked at a boarding school for the first decade of my teaching career, where I supervised dormitories full of motley residents. So naturally, I snorted aloud when I read about Neck Beard’s eviction: “[Caz had] given him plenty of chances to succeed at his duties––to join the other residents for dinner, play chess or watch TV with them, and every Tuesday bring the trash and recycling bins down the road––but he was only interested in recording dungeon synth in the room he had soundproofed with thick gray panels of egg-crate foam and a wool blanket and what looked like military-grade canvas stapled to the floor.” There are standards here, this opening scene suggests––but the punk rockers are willing to extend a fair amount of grace before they issue an ultimatum.
Wolf Bells centers on this “ship of a house,” built a century ago by a grieving sea captain. Caz is his great-granddaughter, the current owner of the house and captain of this grand experiment. After Caz and Vara’s brief encounter with fame in the punk scene, Vara became a nurse, and Caz became an addict. Now, decades on, they’re better together and very much embedded in their community. In fact, they immediately know who to call when two kids turn up on their front porch, escapees from an untenable foster care situation.
What could care look like, if it were not an underfunded institution, a volatile domestic arrangement, or a sterile hospital bed?
As assigned summer reading where I currently teach high school, all rising seniors read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, a boarding school novel that is also a meditation on care work and end of life. It’s a complicated choice for seniors, namely because it’s a story about a bunch of young people on the verge of “graduating” from a cloistered and privileged youth into a horrific and tragic adulthood (spoilers ahead). Ishiguro’s characters are clones, raised for slaughter; they will be living organ donors for other people, up until the point when their bodies can’t take it anymore. They will have their lives stripped from them, one organ at a time, by a state with the power to determine who lives and dies.
In the contemporary United States, there are lots of reasons to have eugenicism on the brain. My word document doesn’t even recognize the word, but it’s important to me to attach that “ism” to the end: to understand it as the belief that a society ought to systematically improve its gene pool. Of course, “improve” here reflects whatever ideological racism, minority oppression, and discrimination operate in that society. Eugenics involves a state’s refusal to build a world that accommodates human beings as they are, with the differences and needs that come with being human.
American eugenicism today looks like unequal, unaffordable access to health tests and treatments. It looks like environmental racism and classism, where one’s geographic proximity to the toxic byproducts of industrial mass production determines one’s life quality and expectancy. Eugenicism today is disguised as MAGA and MAHA; is closely linked to elitism, to minoritization, to ableism.
The fantasy of Wolf Bells, therefore, is a response to these most pernicious systemic oppressions that rob individuals of care and compassion. Forget good genes; what about a good life? And what about a good death? Wolf Bells lets us live among Caz and her diverse, loveable housemates during this intense episode of the house’s history, one that will test its rules as well as its ongoing viability.
While I consider my favorite anti-ageist book to be Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (I was delighted to find it listed as one of Zumas’s references for the novel), this summer gave Carrington a run for her money. Along with Wolf Bells, I read Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness, the story of a young addict named Hai who inadvertently becomes a live-in nurse for Grazina, an irreverent elderly woman with dementia. All three of these books share a particularly vibrant quality as stories about aging, illness, and care: they are funny as hell. Like Carrington and Vuong, Zumas charmed me with her clever ways of representing some of the neurodivergent, atypical minds inhabiting this house’s rooms. She lets us laugh at the absurdities of Caz and Vara’s life, filling these brief chapters with vividly realistic scenes of cohabitation gone awry––alongside moments of radical patience, poignant self-awareness, and goofy authenticity.
Like The Emperor of Gladness, The Hearing Trumpet, and Never Let Me Go, Wolf Bells wants us to look more carefully, and see more lovingly, those that a eugenicist state casts off as disposable. The settings are distinctive––a fast-casual restaurant, a surrealist retirement facility, an elite British boarding school, and a decrepit mansion turned group home––but the stories share an ethos. Here are places where care is a lifestyle. Traditionally, care belongs either to the home or the institution. In these books, it is already understood that those social structures fail, and not because of any particularly evil individual (well…), but because the economics of such structures is not sustainable for most of us, and the value system undergirding it all is rooted in exclusion and bias.
Zumas structures her novel as short chapters named for rooms in the house: the office, the kitchen, the dining room, the front hall, the soundproofed room. As the free indirect narration moves from room to room, it enters the consciousness of each vulnerable soul under this vast, and sometimes leaky, roof.
It’s this double interiority––house and heart––that accords the novel its gravitas. Without interiority, without the privacy of the individual minds under this roof, we would not have a full understanding of what makes this house and its visionaries so heroic. The title refers to bells you might wear to scare away wolves––or at least to let them know you’re there. Zumas not only affirmed all I’d discovered to be special about group living when I was back at boarding school; she also reminded me that in this political age, we might be each other’s only refuge from the circling wolves.
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