THE GHOST CLAUSE

Name: THE GHOST CLAUSE
Author: Howard Norman
ISBN: 978-0-544-98729-6

by Howard Norman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2019

Familiar turf for Norman’s longtime readers, but he still has a knack for finding emotional resonances in muted, unlikely...

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A young couple adjusts to life in a rural Vermont farmhouse and the specter of the novelist who once lived there.

Norman’s fiction (My Darling Detective, 2017, etc.) is death-stalked stuff: His novels are suffused with the ghosts of spouses and parents, murders around hotels and lighthouses, and downcast observations of the somber, foggy Northeast. Though nobody would confuse him for a horror writer, he has a keen eye for the way loss uneasily sticks with those left behind. This time he lets the dead do the talking. Simon, the narrator, is a novelist who died of a heart attack on a ferry in Nova Scotia and who’s returned to his home in Vermont to observe its new occupants: Zachary, a private detective, and Muriel, a scholar of Japanese poetry. The two are suspicious of a strange presence; the alarm in their library keeps getting set off, a book by Wallace Stevens (that most metaphysical of modern poets) can’t stay in one place, and the home’s deed has a “ghost clause” that obligates the prior owner to buy back the home in case of a “malevolent presence.” But the home is stressed enough already, as Zachary works on the case of a missing girl that’s torn up the town and sends him down a series of false leads. This isn’t a plot so much as a kind of atmosphere; Simon observes frustrations, losses, and elisions, from miscarriages to missed leads to his widow, Lorca, deep in mourning. Yet, like the poet Muriel studies, who tucks erotic parentheticals into her mordant poems, a little light slips into the story, resolving both the case of the missing girl and Simon’s uneasy sense of place. What opens as a ghost story turns out to be something of a love story instead.

Familiar turf for Norman’s longtime readers, but he still has a knack for finding emotional resonances in muted, unlikely scenarios.

Pub Date: July 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-544-98729-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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I REFUSED TO BE A WAR BRIDE
by Howard Norman ; illustrated by Annie Bakst

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COME TO THE WINDOW
by Howard Norman

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MY DARLING DETECTIVE
by Howard Norman

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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NONE OF THIS IS TRUE
by Lisa Jewell

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THE FAMILY REMAINS
by Lisa Jewell

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INVISIBLE GIRL
by Lisa Jewell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.