Review 2293: A Haunting on the Hill

I haven’t read a book by Elizabeth Hand in a while, but as I remember, the two I read involved the supernatural. That probably makes this homage to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House a natural fit for her.

Holly has recently won a grant that allows her to take leave from her school-teaching job for a semester and work on a play she’s written. She and her partner Nisa are celebrating by spending the weekend in a B & B in upstate New York when Holly goes for a drive and comes upon Hill House.

Holly decides that the mansion would make a perfect place to workshop and rehearse her play. She is barely able to afford it, and the rental agreement comes with all kinds of relinquishments of liability.

Holly assembles her small cast at the house. There is Nisa, who has written some haunting songs for the play and is going to perform them; Amanda Greer, an older actress who will play the main character, a woman who was burned as a witch in the 17th century; and Holly’s best friend Stevie, who will play a dog/Satan and do the sound. Although Amanda used to be a name, all of them have been struggling for success.

The house makes Nisa and Stevie uncomfortable, and odd things happen right away, but Holly is too obsessed with her play to pay them much heed. And she has spent too much of her money to back out.

Nisa is resentful, because Holly always talks about her play and seems to be jealous when attention is paid to the music. Also, Holly doesn’t know, but Nisa has slept with Stevie repeatedly. Amanda hasn’t worked much since her costar fell to his death from a catwalk while arguing with her. She is inclined to think the others are mocking her. Stevie is a fragile soul who struggles with drug and sex addictions.

At first there are just the huge black hares outside and sounds that might be talking. But each character experiences odd things that he or she dismisses. As the tension builds, it becomes clear that they need to leave.

This is a creepy novel, although not as creepy as the original. But it’s involving and sometimes scary.

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Review 2226: Dust Tracks on a Road

Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s lively memoir, which I read for my Classics Club list.

Hurston was raised in what was essentially in the wilderness at the time in Eatonville, Florida, the first town in the country, she alleges, founded and run by Black people. She was an energetic and imaginative child, and though her family was poor, she seemed to have an idyllic childhood (if you don’t count being whipped, and she didn’t) until her mother died when she was nine. (Other accounts say four, but she says nine.) Not long thereafter, her father remarried and her stepmother soon ran her and her older brother out of the house. (If, when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I had realized she was writing about the founding of Eatonville, I think I would have paid more attention to the information about the town.)

I found it interesting that Hurston had a series of visions as a child and that all of them came true. The first was her mother’s death, the second years of wandering from home to home. Having to go to work at an early age cut into her schooling, but such was her determination to get it that after trying to earn enough at various jobs, she finally just returned to high school, ending up with degrees in anthropology and ethnography from Howard and Barnard Universities.

Hurston relates her life in a lively way with lots of anecdotes, folk stories, and even songs and poetry. Although many of the recollections of her earlier life are very particular, the closer the memoir gets to when she was writing it, the more general it becomes, so we don’t find out much after her first ethnographic studies and novels are completed. Instead, Hurston finishes with a series of discursions on her opinions, which I found less interesting than the story of her childhood and young adulthood.

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Review 2130: The Cartographers

Seven years ago, Nell Young was on her way to her dream job after interning in the Cartography Department at the New York Public Library. Her father, the head of the department, had hinted that a position was hers. In her excitement, she went down into the archives hoping to make a big discovery. This action initiated the Junk Box incident, after which she found herself fired and unemployable. Eventually, she got a job finding and copying maps for decorative purposes. She hasn’t spoken to her father since.

Suddenly, she receives a call from Swann, a former co-worker, telling her that her father was found dead in his office. She goes there to talk to the police. The death appears natural, but they are looking into it. When she is sitting at her father’s desk, she surreptitiously presses a button for a secret drawer and finds a portfolio. Returning home, she finds a map in the portfolio—not just a map but the one that appeared to be worthless when she originally found it in the Junk Box seven years ago, an ordinary road map from 1930.

When Nell looks the map up, she finds that every other copy of it has either been destroyed or stolen. It appears to be valuable on the dark web, but prospective searchers are warned to beware of a mysterious group called The Cartographers.

If you read my blog, you probably know I have a tricky relationship with magical realism. Suffice it to say that I found this novel most interesting before the magic came in, which it did in a obvious way at about page 150.

But I even had some problems with the realistic parts—in particular, that scholars of cartography would take seriously the idea of the Dream Atlas, not to mention the subsequent project.

Another problem was the shift in narration. Most of the book is in third person, but several chapters revealing secrets from the past are narrated by various friends of Nell’s parents. First, multiple narrators need to sound like different people. Shepherd’s do not. Second, the style of third-person narration is different from speaking. Shepherd’s is not.

I guess readers who go into this novel just as an adventure story and don’t look at it too closely will enjoy it most.

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Review 2012: Mohawk

The town of Mohawk, New York, seems very similar to Empire Falls, the setting of another Russo novel. It’s another rustbelt town on the skids supported by the leather industry, which is now being found responsible for polluting the town. Of Russo’s works, it is these tales of ordinary people in rustbelt towns that I think are best.

This novel centers mostly around one extended family but with plenty of auxiliary characters. Dallas Younger is a feckless, unreliable but kind mechanic divorced from Anne, who has moved back to Mohawk from New York largely because she’s in love with Dan Wood, the wheelchair-bound husband of her cousin. Anne’s father, Mather Grouse, is known for his upright life, but he has a secret involving Wild Bill Gaffney, a mentally handicapped young man who was in love with Anne when they were in high school.

Russo’s characters are flawed but mostly likable and fully realized. This novel has a complex plot that is masterfully handled. The novel skips from 1967, when Anne’s son Randall is unhappily attending middle school in Mohawk, trying to avoid a group of bullies and purposefully scoring a bit low on his homework because it doesn’t do to be so smart, to 1971 when he is 18, has quit college, and is avoiding the draft.

For a long time, I avoided reading Russo’s novels because they sounded depressing. They are not. Instead, they demonstrate a warm understanding of and fondness for human nature. This novel sustains me in my belief that his rustbelt novels are his best.

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Review 1857: Murder Out of Turn

Murder Out of Turn is the second of the Mr. and Mrs. North mysteries, which were extremely popular in the 40s and 50s.

Pam and Jerry North have invited their friend Lieutenant Bill Wiegand to their cabin on a lake in northeastern New York State. When he arrives, he finds quite a social group of vacationers finishing up a tennis tournament and then having a party. Wiegand walks one of the women home from the party at night and gets lost on the way back. When he is near the cabin with the partiers, he comes across the body of Helen Wilson, whose throat has been cut. Early the next morning, there is a fire in the cabin of Jean Corbin, killing her.

Having called in the state troopers and the Bureau of Criminal Identification, Wiegand finds Lieutenant Heimrich asking for his help. One of the difficulties for the police is not knowing which murder was intended. Everyone is surprised that anyone would want to murder Helen, although Jean is another story. So, did Jean witness something about Helen’s murder or did Helen about Jean’s? When he investigates further, Wiegand can only find one person who might want to hurt Helen, Dorian Hunt, whose father was tried for fraud. Helen, Hunt’s secretary, reluctantly testified against him. On the other hand, there are several people who may have wanted to kill Jean, jealous wives and coworkers and men she had dumped.

I’m not sure I enjoyed this novel as much as the first one, although it was okay. For me, there were too many details and not enough characterization. The Norths frankly don’t do much to solve the mystery, just get involved in some chases. Having Wiegand fall for a woman who hates cops was a little interesting.

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Review 1739: Oh William!

In Oh William! we meet again Elizabeth Strout’s alter ego, Lucy Barton. Lucy’s second husband David has recently died. She considers her own grief in addition to the state of mind of her first husband, William, who begins to experience some shocks in life.

First, William’s third wife, Estelle, leaves him abruptly. Then William begins to find out some family secrets, particularly about his mother, Catherine. Lucy, who has remained on good terms with William, reflects upon her relationships with him, Catherine, and her own family as she tries to help him.

As usual, the story, which is told as a series of apparently random recollections and incidents, is written in lovely prose. What stands out for me even more than that in the Lucy Barton books is Lucy’s gentleness and the loving, accepting way she approaches the world and the other characters. Although Strout’s novels are not strongly plot driven, once you start one, you just want to keep reading.

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Review 1541: The Sun Down Motel

Best of Ten!
In 1982, 20-year-old Viv has run away from her home in Illinois to go to New York City. Out of money, she stops in Fell, New York, and takes a job on the night shift of the Sun Down Motel. Very soon, two things become certain—the motel is haunted, and a lot of girls get murdered in Fell.

In 2017, Carly finds out after her mother’s death that her mother had a sister who disappeared in 1982. Carly decides to travel to Fell, New York, to try to find out what happened to her. When she makes a trip to the Sun Down Motel to ask about Viv, she ends up taking a job on the night shift. Soon, she is investigating a series of women’s deaths beginning in 1979 and ending in 1982.

I don’t very often give five-star ratings in Goodreads and especially not for genre fiction, but this one is terrific. It’s wildly atmospheric, with its haunted old motel, and it has an ending that puts it a step higher than most of the genre. It has a compelling mystery and two exciting endings, one in each time period. A touch of romance doesn’t hurt it, either. I had great fun reading this book.

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Review 1516: 4321

As we go through life, we make choices and have choices made for us that open up possibilities to us while closing down others. What if we could see the results of taking some of the paths not chosen or those resulting from different circumstances? In 4321, Paul Auster explores this theme.

Archie is the grandson of a Russian immigrant whose name was recorded as Ferguson by an immigration official. 4321 follows Archie as a boy and a young man leading four different lives.

Some things about Archie remain constant while others change. He has the same parents, but in one story they’re happily married, in one a parent is widowed, and in one they are divorced. His father’s business is bought out or burgled or burned down. As a result of the fate of the business, his family is just hanging on to the middle class or wealthy, they live in New Jersey or New York. He always loves Amy Schneiderman, but in one story they are lovers, in another cousins by marriage, in another stepbrother and sister. He goes to college at Columbia or Princeton or not at all. He is a writer—a journalist, a poet, a literary fiction author. And so on.

It is very unusual for me to take more than two weeks to read a work of fiction, but this was the case with 4321. I was reading it for my Booker project, so did not acquaint myself with it before I started. That meant that I had a tough time getting started until I caught on to what was going on with Chapter 1.4. (The chapters are numbered with subsections to help you keep track of the four Fergusons.)

Then, I found myself alternating between being interested and slogging through the book because of my own determination to finish, possibly because I am not that interested in the inner lives (or outer ones) of adolescent boys, and Archie’s story ends at the age of 22. And in fact, the story is uneven. There is way too much information about certain subjects, the political situation at 1969 Columbia University being one, baseball another, Archie’s juvenile fiction, which we get to read (shudder), a third.

I also haven’t seen any references in reviews (not that I read them all) to Auster’s writing style, which is verbose, with long chapters (averaging more than 100 pages) broken down into long paragraphs (often a page or more) and very long, not to say run-on, sentences.

Was this book worth reading? Yes. I was more engaged at the end than in the middle. And spoiler: This book has an interesting ending, as in the last few pages you find out you’ve been reading a work of pure metafiction.

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Review 1414: Lilac Girls

I would like to say to some writers, If you are going to use multiple narrators (please don’t), they must have their own voices. If they don’t sound like different people, this technique doesn’t work. Unfortunately, either Martha Hall Kelly doesn’t know this or can’t do it. I’m not talking about expressed concerns or interests here but actual tone and mode of expression.

Lilac Girls reminds me very much of Salt to the Sea. If you remember my review of that book, you know that’s not a good thing. There’s the World War II setting, the alternating chapters with different narrators, one of whom is the evil Nazi. There is also the unconvincing narrative change, the poor characterization, and the mediocre writing.

Caroline Ferriday is a New York socialite who works for the French Consulate and is involved in charities to help French children. In summer of 1939, there are already lots of refugees fleeing from France. We guess she’s going to become involved in that; however, the first hundred pages of the novel concern her growing relationship with Paul Rodierre, an actor whose wife is trapped in France. Not very interesting, since Hall doesn’t get us to care about Caroline or Paul.

Kasia Kuzmerick is a Polish teenager living in Lublin. When the Nazi attack, she witnesses their planes firing on camps of refugees. Later on, she begins running errands for the resistance.

Herta Oberhauser is a young doctor who has bought the Nazi vision despite having difficulty getting a job because women are expected to be wives and mothers. She finally gets a job working at Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.

Not only did I think the characterization was poor, I felt the behavior of characters was at times unlikely. For example, Kasia is old enough to understand that her mother is being forced to have an affair with a Nazi, yet she makes a dangerous public scene with her about it. Herta is an ambitious doctor who cannot find a job because she is a woman, yet she buys the ideals of the Nazi party that is keeping her down.

I admit I did not finish this novel, which was taking a long time to get anywhere (another problem with such frequent switches in narration). I read about a quarter of the book then decided to quit wasting my time. The story of Ravensbrück is important, but this writer is not up to the task.

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Review 1409: Brookland

Prue Winship grows up the oldest daughter of a gin distiller in 18th century Brooklyn. Her father having failed to have sons, he brings her into the distillery as an apprentice when she is 14, and she learns to run it. She doesn’t expect, though, that her father’s early death will leave her and her sister Temperance in charge of it.

Despite the preoccupations of running a business, Prue has another dream—to build a bridge across the East River into New York. Many have tried to design one, but nothing has been proposed that would not obstruct water traffic for hours. Prue thinks she has an idea that would work.

This seems like it would be a book I would enjoy, but I could not get going in it. I gave it an effort, but after six days of reading, I still wasn’t into it and hadn’t reached the halfway mark. (Usually six days is enough for me to read most works of fiction, no matter how long. Often in six days I have read two or three novels.) I still had about 300 pages to read when I decided to stop. I couldn’t put my finger on my problem. The novel was well written and on an interesting subject. However, it was very slow moving and kept relating the heroine’s dreams. There is nothing more boring than a dream in fiction, I think. Finally, I dimly remember reading a book on this same subject, the distillery and the bridge, years ago, although I am fairly sure it was not this one. So, not the book for me despite its good reviews in the press.

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