I just had to correct some of my summary because I had accidentally identified Mrs. Farnsworth as Lillian, but only the daughter has that name. I don’t think we know her mother’s first name. So many characters to keep straight.
In addition to repeating themes and concepts (madness, the Garden of Good and Evil, infidelity, loneliness, women on the run, etc.), there are also physical items that “travel” from chapter to chapter. We’ve already mentioned the button, the pile of sheep bones, the film reels/flash drive, the Teale paintings – and I just thought of another one: The Bible. It belongs to the Puritan woman, is found by Charles Osgood in an old chest, is dusted by Mary Osgood, is taken by Esther, and finally “burns in the city fire that erupted after the explosion of the SS Mont-Blanc.”
Were Alice, Mary (and presumably Phelan’s) skeletons ever discovered beneath the floorboads? Seems a certainty with all those renovations on the home, but I don’t remember.
What a wonderful discussion and helpful links! Three cheers for @Mary13 's beautiful synopsis.
Put me in the “loved it” column. I listened to the audiobook in June, and then when I got hold of the ebook in late July, I devoured it again, this time experiencing many “aha” moments as the connections became clearer.
It reminds me of my reaction to Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, which I finished and immediately started reading again! My brain must love teasing out the puzzles of interconnected stories. And huge, sweeping, grandiose grab-bag books!
I thought Mason’s dark/subtle humor was wonderful. And his tenderness with the characters. Yes, some of them are awful – well, most of them – but he understands them so deeply. They are so … human.
If I’d known the story had ghosts, I might never have started it, but I was deeply hooked by the time ghosts appeared. I just about cheered when Alice showed up in the blue roadster to catch poor ol’ Morris. (So that’s where that car disappeared to! You go, old girl!)
But the characters weren’t really the main point, of course. It was the place, the house, the land, at center stage, while humans “strut and fret.”
Is that trivial or profound, maybe both at once?
The captive woman weeps while reading As for man, his days are as grass … For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
The whole last chapter, Succession, is just achingly beautiful.
She waits. One by one the big trees fall. Soon the hemlocks are gone, the ash is gone; some years, she travels to see the sugar maples that hold on in Canada and Northern Maine. The apples still bear fruit, cuttings of cuttings of cuttings, grafted onto rootstock that can withstand the heat. Scarlet oak and pawpaw and sweet gum from the hills of Carolina fight to rise above the ranks of burning bush and multiflora rose until, again, the land is cleared to pasture cattle, sheep. Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself as Archivist, and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.
I just tried to roll with it, realizing even the ghosts didn’t quite get how the ghosts worked!
As ghost Nora rides around with ghost Osgood, and she gradually realizes she’s dead too, “She wished to ask him how it was and what the rules were. What she had brought with her, and what she’d left. How one crossed the boundaries, whom she’d meet, and would there come another end. But there was time for this, she knew—lots of time to study and learn how this new world worked.” (page 360)
I noticed that the novel’s epigraph was a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne. Has anyone read The House of the Seven Gables? (I haven’t). It seems like Hawthorne might have been one of Mason’s influences.
The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. The House of the Seven Gables - Wikipedia
One of the questions that occurred to me as I was reading was “does this house have a code of ethics?” I never came to a satisfactory answer for that.
Because my literary tastes are simple, I’m reminded of the picture book by Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House, which chronicles the story of a happy little pink house who watches as technology advances and the city gradually overtakes the countryside. The house is an anthropomorphized protagonist.
Good question. The house (and/or its ghosts) protects Esther from the bounty hunter and Lillian from the ex-con. And it’s also benign where Helen is concerned. Even though “from the beginning, she hated the yellow house," she wanders through it without fear – “Sadness, exhaustion, regret, but not fear.”
But then I get stuck on Robert, who suffers terribly–and seemingly undeservedly–from “The Harrow.”
I like that thought. I wondered if the house had a soul, or some decision making power, about which ghosts got to stay there and which wandered elsewhere. Osgood, Nora, Teale, all maybe qualify to stay because they love the land. Alice is liberated from under the floor and drives her roadster – that’s the kind of ghost I would love to be! The slave catcher Phelan’s hat remains, but not him, as far as we know. Or is he one of the evil spirits that haunt Robert.
Robert did suffer, but his loving mother protected him from a gruesome, barbaric lobotomy. So as sad as his symptoms were, I felt he was spared worse.
Quite the history of medical treatments for mental health starting with Osgood’s Wacky diagnosis regarding his Apple obsession, the Clairvoyant Anastasia brought in to aid Mrs Farnsworth hallucinations, Robert’s near lobotomy, ending with Nora’s sophisticated self care of her diabetes.
Wow! Thanks so much to @Mary13 for the extensive summary, and to @jerseysouthmomchess for the very helpful timeline. My other book group went through the book and tried to figure this all out, but with much less detail.
So…that book group liked the book much more than a lot of the people here, at least overall. On the characters, we agreed with @ignatius: we admired the Puritan girl who grew up to recognize evil and “stepped up to prevent it, at the cost of her life.” We liked Helen and Nora. And we loved the humorous chapter with Madame Rossi, who pretended to reach the spirits in the house–until she actually did.
None of us are generally big on ghosts and magical realism, but this book had so much reality to balance that in the depictions of landscape and human emotions that we just sort of went with it.
We’re all art lovers (and two are artists), so we were fascinated by the idea of the Museum of Fine Arts show Nora consulted on, with virtual reality time travel back to the detailed scenes in the landscapes of William Henry Teale. We would have liked to have seen that! @Mary13 and @jerseysouthmomchess report that the letters might have been influenced by the letters between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Melville lived in Western Mass., but neither of them were painters. So I wonder if Mason had a painter in mind, maybe Frederic Edwin Church? Church painted some landscapes in the area, as well as ones based on sketches from his many travels (but as far as I know, no same sex love story there). (His house in Hudson, NY, Olana, on hilltop with great views of the Hudson River, is a beautiful place to visit.)
The house we stayed in HAS had additions, but it isn’t that old. No ghosts were sighted!
I loved thinking about paintings by the Hudson River School when I was reading this. This website gives you an idea of what a yesterday and today exhibit might look like: Hudson River School Art Trail — Hudson River Art Trail
I missed so many things reading it. Partly because I kept putting the book down to read other things. So, for example, I somehow completely missed that the wonderful apple variety was growing out of a corpse! There’s a lot of macabre stuff in here.
@mathmom Thanks so much for the Hudson River School links! I have memories of living in that area years ago. Those views of the Catskills, especially, are dear to me and got me feeling all nostalgic.
(A benefit of CC Book Club that I did not anticipate!)
This discussion is beginning to answer my original question of “Why so much darkness?” I think Mason is reminding us that the beautiful and the ugly are inextricably entwined: the exquisite apple springs from a corpse; gentle Alice and murderous Mary are identical twins; the Soul Heirs co-exist with the Harrow; the squirrel is a bloody dinner for the owl, but also the source of chestnut trees:
Until at last, her moment came:
When from the white, she heard his breath,
And striking, left upon the snow
The feather’d silhouette of death.
With squirrel gone, the stash remains,
Entomb’d within the snows,
Where they’ll survive, 'til spring arrive
And burst their husks, and grow.
The connecting threads are everywhere in this book. I’m flipping through and find in one of Teale’s letters to Nash:
Were I able to paint what I am trying to say, it would be a simple canvas, two linked spirits in a glen more beautiful than ever I have painted.
And then at the seance:
Anastasia, terrified, transfixed, could see a pair of half-formed beings, one of pure white light and the other of a thousand shifting colors. Tumbling, playful, luminous creatures. She wished to go with them. She wished to scream (p. 201).
Again, the marvelous and the horrifying go hand-in-hand: terrified/transfixed; wished to join them/wished to scream.
So many characters to keep straight.
