I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

           It isn’t every day that I read a book based on the BookTok hype, but I found myself intrigued by Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men. The hype is a little strange, given that the book was originally published thirty years ago. I suppose the renewed traction is the result of its new 2022 translation by Sophie Macintosh. It also turned out to be part of a pattern in my reading for 2025—novels about women in isolated situations.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a post-apocalyptic novel that offers more questions than answers. The novel’s protagonist is the youngest girl in a group of women who’ve been imprisoned in an underground bunker, continually surveilled by men with whips. The women were previously unknown to each other, don’t know how they got there, don’t know why they’re being monitored. It’s a world shrouded in mystery—and it might not even be our world; it’s heavily implied that they’re on a different planet entirely, which is a fun twist.

Our protagonist knows nothing of how the world was before and so is doubly othered. Like the other women, she can’t explain why things are the way they are. Unlike other women, she has no point of comparison. The conspiratorial nature of the book is presented early on and its ambiguity is one of the highlights of the text. In conversation with other women, the narrator is told, “No one has the slightest idea what’s behind all this. There isn’t the slightest clue. They rounded up the adults—you’re almost certainly here by accident. At first—well, not really at first, because there’s a period that remains hazy in everybody’s minds—but after that, from the time when our memories became clearer, we know we used to think all the time” (25). The mystery goes on: the men could have killed all the women or taken them away elsewhere, but the men don’t kill them. The interlocutor says, “your arrival would have brought news, and the one thing we are certain of is that they don’t want us to know anything. We came to the conclusion that they left you here because any decision can be analysed, and that their lack of decision indicated the only thing they wanted us to know, which is that we must know nothing” (25). There’s a perversity in the captors’ logic. Their calculated ambiguity disrupts all comprehension.

There’s a kind of relationship between knowledge and desire that emerges in the early chapters of the book. Following the conversation above, the protagonist notes that she “experienced a mild light-headedness which was rather pleasant. It reminded me vaguely of the eruption and I promised myself I’d see if I could work it into one of my stories” (25). She notes how “never had any of the women spoken to [her] at such length” and she “sensed that she’d passed on to me everything she knew” (25). There’s a kind of titillation in knowing things, in having secrets revealed. When she refers to “the eruption,” she alludes to a kind of early adolescent fantasy about one of the guards, a figure of knowledge-power (how Foucault!). That fantasy itself, also rendered ambiguous, is pretty twisted. It’s somewhere around Stockholm Syndrome but without the language to even describe her experience.

When the protagonist senses the importance of secrets, she dabbles in formulating her own. In her experiments, she reflects:

Andrea, who was the brightest of the women, immediately grasped that it wasn’t the actual content of the secret that mattered, but the fact that while living under the continual scrutiny of other women, it was possible to claim to have a secret and be believed. This seemed too complicated for the women to understand and they dismissed Anthea with a gesture of annoyance, demanding that the secret be prised from me. (18)

What I appreciate about Harpman’s approach is that she sets up early that the structure of the secret is what matters, not the content. The rest of the book breeds that paranoiac thinking. The key plot points in the book are secrets. Partway through the novel, the women all escape the bunker. With no explanation, the men are gone, the doors are open, and the women are free to go. They then wander what may or may not be Earth, unsure of whether they’ll ever find another refuge. The group does eventually find equally inexplicable bunkers: bunkers where the women have all died without being released, but then there are also bunkers of men, so the potential explanations fall apart. Later, the protagonist comes across a bus of deceased guards wearing gas masks and things—again, with no explanation offered. The secret prevails.

I forgot to mark off the passage, but there’s even a part about how questions keep her going. After questions, there are new questions, and those questions give us purpose. It’s interesting how Harpman brings together the idea of secrecy, desire, power, and purpose.

The other element that was most compelling to me philosophically was the idea of time. The narrator essentially invents time from scratch. She starts to measure her heartbeat, counting the regular rhythm of its beats. She then extrapolates to count minutes and hours. I have to say, it’s pretty unbelievable to think she would actually be able to keep track of time while doing other things. If I suspend my disbelief entirely, what I think is more interesting is that the earliest experiences the narrator tells us about are related to desire, secrecy, and then time, the lattermost being the one that starts to give meaning to experiences. Time is converted into a weapon—if she can measure time, she can plot against the guards. I find that a really engaging way of thinking through the fundamentals of being human.

Admittedly, it’s been several months since I actually read this book and I’m trying to catch up on my reviews now, but I did find there were several moving sequences. The book spans decades. As the women get older, the central character takes on the role of euthanizing them. Rather than succumbing to illness or disease, the main character stabs them through the heart, not having particular hang-ups about suicide (for example). It’s heartbreaking to watch as the women die one after the other. The relationships are ambiguously romantic and it’s painful to see the narrator lose the woman closest to her and to be left alone forever.

Overall, I’d say I quite enjoyed the book. Given how much the characters focus on what happened, I would have expected there to be answers, but that’s not how the world works. There’s a heartfulness to the book, even if the narrator sometimes comes across as cold. The plot is mysterious and its ambiguity is compelling. It’s a philosophic meditation that is as frustrating as it is moving. A lot of people really hyped this up as being a perfect book; I’m not sure that’s quite true, but I did like it. It’s worth the read.

Happy reading!

Utopia by Heidi Sopinka

“She’s driving a speed addict’s car in an inside-out shirt, on painkillers, with a hand wrapped in gauze, on her way to find her husband’s dead ex-wife. If she concentrates hard enough, these things will snap into a logical pattern” (146).

If you find these two sentences enticing, then you might be inclined to read Heidi Sopinka’s novel Utopia. In the first section of her novel, we are introduced to two central characters: Billy and Romy, conceptual artists in 1970s America. Billy is a successful artist, primarily by virtue of being male and stealing some of his best known works from Romy. Romy, meanwhile, is taking on ambitious experiential works about light and has a track record of projects that seem in conversation with real-life artist Marina Abramović. Romy has not been as successful and the reason is because she’s a woman. In the opening twenty pages or so of the book, we discover that Romy is a new mother to Billy’s child and we find them all at an artist party getting sloppily drunk. It is on that night that Romy falls to her death, and it’s never quite certain Billy is innocent of murdering her.

From there, we flash forward to Paz, another budding artist and Billy’s second wife. The novel then becomes a sort of inverted version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Sopinka has the good sense to acknowledge directly. While Paz is in conversation with her friend, she starts the conversation, “Last night I dreamed —” and her friend interrupts, “That you went to Manderley again” (23). For those unfamiliar with the novel, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” and the novel’s unnamed narrator is haunted by the dead and perfect Rebecca. She feels she is forever in her shadow. Sopinka’s Paz goes through a similar experience, feeling overlooked for her art and by her partner, remembering Romy as an incredible force. As a result, she feels a sense of unreality hovering over her: “I dreamed, not for the first time, that I was in an apocalyptic wall of flames” (23). She then insists that her friend touch the table, and Essa tells her, “Nothing is wrong with this table.” Paz, in turn, “has an uneasy feeling that this does not feel like real life, exactly” (23). When Billy leaves for an exhibition elsewhere and leaves Paz alone at home with his daughter, combined with the fact that she finds Romy’s old diaries, is a perfect storm for her to descend into paranoid speculation and dissociative behaviours.

As the book progresses, Paz becomes less and less certain of herself and more resentful of the gender dynamics in her relationship. Here’s a passage after making love with Billy:

After, she looks over at Billy sleeping. How can he always sleep? She’s always flopping around like a fish that’s been caught. She sits on the bed holding her knees to her chest, wishing she still smoked. Her eyelids flicker. She’s taken a sleeping pill and is fighting it. The curtains move in the breeze and she gets up, hearing a little clicking noise that she follows downstairs, walking slowly. She sits on the couch, the sound of crickets loudly coming through the windows. After a few minutes she walks out onto the porch. In her half-sleep state, she thinks of him sleeping above. He gets to come and go, sleep with her, not give anything away. She lets it happen, but still she can’t help thinking how much power he has. He told her he was glad to be back, and she believed him. But what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again. (114)

The passage captures that sleepy existentialism and morose midnight reflections I’m sure most people have experienced. Sopinka effectively captures that kind of hyperawareness that happens towards night. Paz’s restlessness is very true to life, and the final lines of the passage punctuate the scene really beautifully: “what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again.”

So let’s start again. Utopia is, in some ways, two novels at once. On the one hand, it’s a thrilling and suspenseful mystery: what happened to Romy? On the other hand, it’s a kind of künstlerroman for Paz to discover who she is as an artist. In some ways, it matches the tonal register of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi or Second Place by Rachel Cusk. It’s also like two novels in that it alternates between being tantalizingly uncertain and bludgeoningly direct.

Both of the registers have their merits, but I’m more inclined towards the mysterious, paranoid side of the equation. In that respect, the relationship between Paz and Romy is most effective. Paz lives in Romy’s shadow, who had lived in Billy’s shadow, and now finds herself obsessed with her husband’s dead wife. Paz cannot escape her jealousy when she finds Romy’s diary, but also must grapple with the guilt of having read it:

The next time she opened it, she found a thin notebook with pale-blue lines, writing of Romy’s detailing works in progress with a kind of murderous compression that verged on poetry. There was a scrap of paper wedged in as a bookmark that fell into her lap. Paz unfolded it. In Billy’s writing, it said ONLY YOU. Her stomach contracted. The words seemed to leap out at her, bringing a flush of jealousy, and then shame at herself for having looked at them. (25)

First of all, I like the characterization of Romy’s writing as “murderous compression that verged on poetry.” The terse note from Billy that says “ONLY YOU” is just the right phrase to inspire that jealousy in Paz; she is another, which is a serious problem for the circle of women artists that accuse Paz of stealing Romy’s life (including her work). Yet, in flashbacks we see that Romy and Paz seem to have their own special connection, opening up to each other in ways that they typically do not (despite Paz’s completely awkward fan-girling)..

In addition to the ambiguity of whether Paz is married to a murderer, Sopinka turns the screw further when Paz starts receiving postcards from Romy. Romy is supposed to dead, but is her death all a performance piece? There are a number of details that throw question on her death; supposedly only one person saw her body. She had also discussed plans for a big artistic project that takes place in the desert. These tidbits, along with the fact that postcards are arriving to Paz with succinct yet ominous messages, create a great dramatic tension. Is Paz part of a twisted game that Romy is playing? Will she emerge from the shadows to show that her death was all part of a performance piece? After all, she fell to her death and had already taken photos of ‘falling’ (which Billy stole and got credit for).

I opened with the passage of Paz driving into the desert. She accidentally severs her finger, and then drives into the desert to follow a lead on the postcard. Paz follows Romy’s footsteps, which again feels conceptual, and then discovers more and more clues before finding Romy’s final artistic project and sharing in communion with it. I won’t spoil more at this point, because that core mystery is finely wrought.

The other component of the book is a direct commentary on the art world that leaves no room for ambiguity. Setting the book in the 1970s is a smart move in that respect, and there’s a clear pattern of male artists getting away with all kind of misogyny while women are left debating how to make it in the art world. There are some hardline views and debate amongst the women, who at times cannibalize one another and at others try to challenge the fundamentally competitive nature of a patriarchal art world.

Towards the end of the book, Billy is taken to court and questioned about Romy’s death. The presentation is excellent; the narration alternates between court transcripts and Paz’s masterwork art project. Going back and forth every few sentences has a great dramatic flare and it’s an effective culmination to multiple storylines. The court transcripts routinely downplay the importance of art in women’s lives and to pathologize women’s experiences. Here are a few examples:

THE DECEASED’S FUTURE PLANS FOR EXHIBITIONS, HER GUGGENHEIM GRANT, AND THE CREATION OF A LONG-TERM PROJECT HAVE BEEN OFFERED UP BY THE PROSECUTORS TO RULE OUT ANY NOTION OF SUICIDE. (OF NO CONSEQUENCE.) 

[...]

EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT THE DECEASED WAS GIVEN TO IRRATIONAL OUTBURSTS OVER MINOR OCCURRENCES AND WAS PRONE TO HYSTERIA, PARTICULARLY AS A POST-PARTUM FEMALE. (ADMISSABLE.)

[...]

WITNESSES SAY SHE LIVED FOR HER WORK. (HEARSAY.)

[...]

ACCORDING TO SEVERAL REPUTABLE SOURCES, THE DECEASED’S WORK HAD, QUOTE UNQUOTE, DEATH VIBES TO IT. (215)

The importance of Romy’s work is downplayed as being of no consequence and that she lived for her work is mere hearsay. What does get accounted for by the court is her post-partum depression and that her work supposedly had “death vibes” (which is a hilarious critique and hits too close too home for casual art commentary).

I’ve not presented the climactic moment for Paz that is interwoven with the court case. In part, it’s because I feel like it ought to be experienced. The other component is that, all things considered, it felt a bit saccharine. Towards the end of the book, there are a lot of feel-gooderies and optimistic moments that don’t entirely hit the mark. It’s a bit of a shame because so much of the book is well-written and the tensions in the text feel a little too easily resolved for effective payoff. 

In terms of style, Sopinka is often rich in description and imagery. An early passage in the book really got me invested in her rich language: “From the porch, [Paz] watched the lawn losing its green, like a lens tightening. Bodies of flies piled at the windowscreens. She began to wander when Flea was sleeping, searching for what, she wasn’t sure. She’d move through the rooms looking over her shoulder, with the methodical self-absorption of a thief, even though she knew Billy wouldn’t be home for hours and that it wasn’t possible for the kind of truth she was looking for in a drawer” (25). The image of a lens tightening is fantastic, especially given the artists’ work with photography. Paz’s characterization with “methodical self-absorption of a thief” adds to the awkward tension of her relationship. Elsewhere, in fact from the passage that started the review, Paz captures the spirit of a manic artist beautifully: “Paz is suddenly ravenous. She fishes around but she’s already finished most of what’s on the passenger seat. She kicks off her sandals and drives in her bare feet. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror and sees that her shirt is inside out. The heat makes the scenery look almost two-dimensional. It gives it a radical geometry” (146). At the end of that section, there is some great imagery about the two-dimensional desert and its “radical geometry.”

Throughout the book, since the artworks are often so connected to place, there is a lot of description of the setting. There’s a transcendent kind of moment when Paz tracks down Romy’s work with light—which actually reminded me, partially, of an art work I saw in New York where there was a crisp cut square of sky. In any case, Sopinka’s descriptions offer some rich material. The book offers some great visuals.

Towards the end of the book, there’s a short section that wraps things up. There’s a twist to the book similar to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise which is fine, though not quite as dramatic or mind-blowing as Choi’s novel. The bulk of the book stands on its own well, but the final section adds a few more dimensions and solidifies the feminist impulse of the text.

Overall, I was really impressed with Utopia. There is a lot in the book to like, and even love. The central mystery of the book really finely developed. The characterization in the book is really effective, which leads to strong relationships between characters. The writing is generally strong, if overly ‘clean’ towards the end. Heidi Sopinka is one of the writers I’ve read for the first time this year and is one of my “new writers to watch.”

Happy reading!

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

        The golden rule of show business is to always leave your audience wanting more. David Mitchell is a bad boy who continually breaks this rule. I’ve read two other of David Mitchell’s novels, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, after which I had written off its author as a meandering hack. At the behest of a colleague whose taste I trust, I decided to give Mitchell another chance by reading Black Swan Green. Now, having finished it, I think it is largely like his other novels: it has some merits, it’s too long by half, it succumbs to bloat, and feels adrift. Mitchell seems to have some great ideas but just can’t bring them all together into a cohesive story.

Black Swan Green is probably the most focused of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read. It’s a Bildungsroman about Jason Taylor, a young British boy with a speech impediment that dabbles in poetry. Each chapter deals with a kind of formative moment in his life, ranging from being bullied by his classmates to having his poetry edited by an elderly woman to being supervised by his dad’s subordinate to his first kiss to his parents’ failing marriage. The novel reads as, mostly, episodic. There are through-lines and characters that pop-up repeatedly, but a lot of the chapters could be read in isolation.

To be clear, I have no issue with “slice of life” fiction. It gives Mitchell the freedom to deal with a range of experiences and offer insights into the psychology of youth and beyond. A number of the lessons that Jason learns are poignant, especially when viewed through the lens of a child. However, I kept expecting there to be a conflict that developed in a cohesive way. There’s some hint of that with Jason’s speech impediment and how he deals with bullies, but some chapters felt superfluous to the grander vision of the book. The last few chapters seem to tie details together and bring threads to a close, but it didn’t feel earned in the same way that a continuous story does. It shoehorns in lessons about secrecy and guilt, which, on their own, are great, but feel underdeveloped in Jason’s inner conflict and quickly resolved with the aim to give the book a ‘point.’ 

That’s not to say I didn’t like the concept. There’s a great chapter where Jason finds a bully’s wallet, replete with six hundred pounds, and debates with himself what to do with it. That’s the most finely wrought guilt sub-plot in the book, in my opinion, because it also leads to other layers of guilt: the boy whose wallet was lost fights his girlfriend; Jason finds out that the bully’s dad will likely beat him and decides to give the wallet back; the bully finds his girlfriend to make up and finds her hooking up with someone else; he gets angry and steals a motorbike, gets in an accident, and loses his leg. All this for a lost wallet. It’s the kind of turn-of-the-screw that captures the absurdity of how life actually is.

Mitchell sometimes gets things so right that it’s hard to resist the book’s charm. In one chapter, Jason’s aunt, uncle, and cousins come to visit. The tension and one-upmanship of his family is uncomfortable. In particular, Jason’s mom tries to leverage his poetry to gain points with the extended family, not realizing how negatively this would be received. Of course, it goes over like a lead balloon—until his older cousin Hugo comes to his defence. The chapter is beautifully done: Hugo is a charmer who wins Jason’s confidence before they retreat to play some darts, during which Hugo tears into his younger brother and then denies that he made him cry. He later shoplifts and forces Jason into being an accomplice. The journey of the chapter is excellent, since Hugo is presented in such a positive light before the curtain gets pulled back—we’re right alongside Jason’s experience of learning about Hugo. I love that tension and nuance of Hugo’s character development.

Later, there’s a scene that reads as both true to life and pleasantly mischievous. Jason is searching for a secret tunnel alongside his friend, though the two get separated. Jason then comes across Dawn Madden, a girl with dark honey eyes. There’s a kind of ambiguous flirtation where she makes him act like a dog and offers him a snack. The scene perfectly captures that awkward but exciting temptation of youth. The girl’s flirtations are cruel but hard to resist—except, of course, at that age, boys often don’t pick up on what these interactions mean. Jason botches the flirtation and is sent away with threats of Dawn’s dad’s shotgun. I loved that scene.

Other areas of the book are relatable, too, sure. When Jason is becoming a budding poet and trying to get a grasp on the craft, I can see some of the pitfalls I’ve experienced reflected in Jason’s early works, too. That said, there are some surprisingly poetic descriptions in the book: “Run across a field of daisies at warp speed but keep your eyes on the ground. It’s ace. Petaled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe. Moran and I got to the barn at the far side, dizzy with intergalactic travel. I was laughing more than Moran ‘cause Moran’s dry trainer wasn’t dry anymore, it was glistening in cow shit” (80).

In fact, there are a number of lines in the book about the writing process and love of the written word that I quite enjoyed. For instance, Jason describes how arranging words together speeds up time. In a different section, Jason is referring to metronomes, and notes that “Metro Gnomes’re in rain and poems too, and breathing, not just tocks of clocks” (34). The significance of writing to the main character shines through.

In fact, what Mitchell does well is ‘voice.’ He’s great at taking on a particular voice in his writing and sustaining a commitment to that style. This is true in the diverse time periods and styles in Cloud Atlas, and is thoroughly developed in Jason’s internal monologue. In many cases, Jason sounds like the youth he is, and the narrational style perpetually keeps in mind the fact that the narrator has a speech impediment. He interrupts ideas because “Hangman” (the metaphor for his speech impediment) stands in the way. Intrusive thoughts are attributed to Jason’s Unborn Twin. The kinds of logic and calculations that Jason engages in feel authentic for a young man trying to find his place in the world. Even the rumination of who is called what is compelling: you can sort the popularity of the children based on who calls each other by last names, first names, or nicknames. It feels accurate, even if I can’t recall an example from my own experience at this exact moment.

The more I write about Black Swan Green, the more I think of moments in the text I found touching. Even the understated moment of Jason’s older sister Julia moving away is handled with beautiful tact. If you think of the book as a collection of moments, it’s pretty good. If you go in expecting an actual novel, I think the continuousness of the story is lacking. It’s actually a little like To Kill a Mockingbird—lots of moments that are loosely tied together. In particular, there’s a town hall meeting where the villagers are up in arms about a group of nomadic people in the area (they use the G word, if that helps contextualize what I’m referring to). Jason Taylor is essentially Scout Finch in this scene, witnessing first hand the racism in his community. Then, he ends up falling into a pit where they are staying and is forced to see first hand that they are not so bad and, in fact, the prejudice against them is actually more relatable than he had thought. Again, the scene works reasonably well on its own as a lesson in not judging others. The conflict is then essentially dropped, with the only callback being that the nomadic people run the county fair and one of the boys from the encampment comes to Jason’s aid.

All things considered, it’s a reasonably good book. Shave off a hundred pages and it might even be great. Prior to Black Swan Green, I was almost certain I would never read another David Mitchell book. After reading Black Swan Green, I still don’t feel inclined to read David Mitchell, but I’ll bump him up from “never again” to “maybe in a decade if I run out of other books.”

Happy reading!

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

  We’re a full week into September and consistent with my personal life but uncharacteristic of my reading habits, we’re into spooky season. In an effort to get me out of my reading routine, Harneet gifted me Home Before Dark by Riley Sager, a horror / mystery novel about a haunted house (which I admit, of the horror tropes, is one of my favourites). The core issues in the novel revolve around family, secrecy, and betrayal, and those themes are woven through the book and revealed through a series of twists. And there are twists galore.

Since the book is largely story-driven, it would be illogical not to give you the synopsis before giving commentary on it. Two stories are presented in alternating chapters throughout the book. In the present, Maggie Holt’s father has died, his final words an apology. In Ewan Holt’s will, though, is Maggie’s childhood home in which she lived for only about twenty days and which she thought was sold as soon as they moved out about twenty-five years earlier. Despite warnings from her parents, Maggie moves into the home and begins her renovations project and also her search for truth. The other chapters are in the past: they are chapters from a book Maggie’s father, Ewan, wrote. A journalist by trade, Ewan bought the haunted house, in part, for its sordid past: a history of murder-suicides, mysterious occurrences, and so on. He then novelized the hauntings that took place there, with a self-playing record player, snakes falling from the ceiling, and violent ghost attacks.

Back to the present: Maggie Holt is trying to parse the small-town politics surrounding Baneberry Hall and figure out why her father kept the house, what secrets were kept from her, and why she has been lied to for all these years. Meanwhile, the hauntings persist: items disappear spontaneously, shadowy figures abound, and the ceiling collapses once again, this time revealing a literal bag of bones instead of snakes.

Home Before Dark proves instructive about some elements of narrative structure. I’d also make an unlikely connection here to Lord of the Rings for a similar issue with the frame narrative. Long ago, I wrote about how when Gandalf comes back from the dead and tells the story of his survival, all of the implicit drama is deflated because you already know he survives. I think a similar issue is true for Home Before Dark, since the book about the haunted house involves characters that we know survived. Well, for the most part. As a result, the hauntings aren’t exactly scary, which should be the focus of a horror novel, no?

There’s also the issue of pacing. In the first two hundred pages or so, very little haunting happens. As I referenced above, there are moments of spookiness, but rather than incremental intensification (turning the screw), it reads as repetitive. How many times do we need to hear the record of The Sound of Music playing mysteriously? I recognize that horror needs to move slowly to build suspense, but the intensity needs to grow, as well, rather than relying on the cheap trick of some spooky foreshadowing at the end of every chapter of Ewan Holt’s book.

The final third of the novel ramps up the action and offers twists at every turn. Some of the twists were visible from a mile away. For instance, one character in the first hundred pages notes that he has never read Ewan’s book (though everyone has). About fifty pages later, a police officer says that anyone who claims not to have read it is a liar. Thus, it was clear that the character who said he had never read it was lying. I was right and it took a while to actually reveal what he was lying about. Other twists are completely unpredictable (e.g. the revelation of a secret passageway in a super obvious place—highlight convenient). Some of the twists seemed of no consequence; one character had dated a murder victim, is presented as the murder, revealed not to be, and then it never explains why he behaved so strangely.

I feel like I had some cognitive dissonance around the twists. I have some mixed feelings about that; on the one hand, things that were clearly implausible had me rolling my eyes. Then, once the twist was revealed, it justified that inconsistency with reality. On the one hand: it’s a great move for the thinking reader. On the other hand: it might just be a cheap trick. Here are two examples, which both involve spoilers—skip to the next paragraph if you’re invested. Spoiler #1: The rules of the ghostly world make no sense. It is eventually revealed in Ewan Holt’s book that the ghost forces men to murder their daughters. It’s unclear, though, why the father has to do it. In one scene, the ghost physically lifts Maggie off the floor and lifts her to the ceiling before dropping her when Ewan threatens self-harm. Why does the ghost need Ewan at all? The ghost could just lift Maggie up and drop her from the highest point in the house. Later, it’s revealed that the book is a lie to protect Maggie, so it makes sense to ham it up for the mass audience, but when you’re reading you think: wtf? Spoiler #2: Home Before Dark reveals the deep secret in one of the last chapters: Ewan’s book was written to protect Maggie because she is a murderer. Rather than let her be exposed as a murderer, it was better to write a book about a haunted house to explain why they had to run away the same time a young girl disappeared. But here’s the thing: first of all, she’s five years old. How could she not remember murdering someone? How could she have thrown a teenager down the stairs? Who in their right mind would prosecute a five year old? All of those circumstances seem absurd for the twist. Of course, there’s a second twist that answers some of these questions, but it’s a little unsatisfying.

What I like more about the book are the more human components of the text. For example, there are the literal hauntings in the book, but more compelling is the way that her father’s book haunts Maggie’s life. I like the fact that the book follows her throughout her life, that others judge her for the book, and that it has formed so much of her identity (a psychologist has to reveal to her that her interior design career might be a way to regain control over the childhood trauma of the haunted house; gee, really?). More than any supernatural element, the human form of haunting is more tangible and compelling.

There’s a great moment early on in the book that involves the secret and flips it. A deathbed revelation of a secret is compelling. When Maggie reveals to her mother that her father still owned the house and left it to her, Maggie’s mom offers to buy it, ostensibly to make Maggie’s life easier. Yet, the immediate suspicion that that arouses is a delightful hook. Why would she want to buy the house that she vows never to return to and tells Maggie never to go to? Despite professing to tell the truth, her mother withholds a secret behind a kind facade.

Something I struggled with throughout the book, though, is how the secrets are addressed. Maggie is constantly looking for clues as to whether her dad’s book was real. She is a complete sceptic that the house is haunted, but then the details from the book start adding up. Maggie vacillates between belief and disbelief all throughout the book. But there’s a flaw in her logic. She seems to believe that if some details are accurate, then the whole book is real, and if one detail is false, then the whole book is fake. It’s a naive take that the book has to be either entirely true or entirely false.

Beyond that, the cast of characters is reasonably well-developed. We’re dealing with a fair number of stock characters, but Sager does identify their specific motivations well in most cases. In the majority of cases, the motivations are plausible and help to explain the mysteries surrounding the house. I imagine that this book is “cozy” in that the stock characters are recognizable enough to be inviting to readers, especially readers of genre fiction. I do appreciate Sager’s restraint with respect to the romantic interest, which deviates from what I think most people will expect.

Ultimately, I think Home Before Dark is interesting for things it doesn’t do. (Cue the scene from The Simpsons where Lisa says jazz is about the notes they don’t play). It seems to be a trope in horror that the haunting starts small and gets incrementally bigger. From a narrative standpoint, that makes a lot of sense and is very satisfying. But, why is it that ghosts have a sense of narrative structure? How come we never get horror stories where the very first haunting is the walls bleeding and eyeballs melting and whatnot? The other thing I think is interesting and has been absent from horror is the epistemic consequences of ghosts. There is always a scene in horror fiction where people go find the truth of the haunting, often by browsing the archives of a library (or in this case the local newspaper). Somehow, history always explains our contemporary ghosts. Yet, why do we assume that ghosts, occupying a different ontological status than the living, occupy the same epistemological position as us? Being able to explain ghosts’ incentives takes away from the horror of a haunting—to me, the incomprehensibility of ghosts’ actions (and that their motives would be completely unknown to us, perhaps we are beneath their notice altogether…) makes for a more sophisticated horror than a facile ghost-wants-revenge. Those are the possibilities I’d want to explore if I ever write my own horror novel.

(Sidenote: it is pretty fun that the ghost rings bells in the house to communicate and that Ewan translates each bell to a letter of the alphabet; that’s a fun, clever idea).

In short, Home Before Dark is a horror-mystery hybrid that I would agree verges on detective fiction more thoroughly towards the end. If you want an entertaining plot-driven narrative, this is probably a good choice for you. There is twist-after-twist-after-twist-after-twist. Harneet wanted to push me out of my comfort zone with this book. In some ways, it has achieved its mission. I’ve read something very different from what I usually read, and, having recently read The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher, I think I was engaging pretty thoughtfully with the narrative possibilities of the genre. I also watched horror movies all summer, so maybe horror literature is the next frontier.

Haunted reading!

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

    Mysterious forces often drive human behaviour. I’m not clear what compelled me to, after so thoroughly hating The Turn of the Screw, to pick up such a lengthy Henry James novel: The Portrait of a Lady. While both works exemplify James’ drawn out, multiple-claused sentences, the slow burn of James’ courtship-driven novel was a surprisingly pleasurable experience. Don’t get me wrong—I still wouldn’t skyrocket James to the top of my must-read novelists, but the novel took some surprising turns that gave me pause to contemplate the nature of the craft.

    Before delving further, an outline of the plot would be helpful. The novel’s focus is Isabel Archer, an American woman visiting London, and her particular affectations (and affections) in navigating the world. Miss Archer is a deeply independent free-thinker, which (some might argue) problematizes the trajectory of her life. For instance, she continually turns down marriage proposals because she does not want to give up her life to others. While The Portrait of a Lady is largely a run-of-the-mill courtship and marriage novel in that respect, it’s the inversion of tropes that sets James’ novel apart.

    The first surprising inversion is just how early and consistently marriage proposals are offered to Isabel and then when Isabel ultimately decides to marry Gilbert Osmond, who for all my money was the least likely candidate, James glosses over the courtship and rationale. For a book so committed to exploring the interiority of its characters, Isabel’s love of Osmond is given remarkably little attention. The most intimate and romantic moments in the book all occur with her other suitors—Caspar Goodwood, Lord Warburton, and, even her cousin Ralph Touchett, with whom she has debatably romantic moments. For someone so adamantly opposed to marriage to finally accept from the most banal candidate with no fanfare is a shocking turn in the book and it’s a perfect commentary on the mysterious internal forces that govern us. Not disclosing the love is one of James’ most radical moves in the book and my preference would actually be to remove the part a hundred pages later that retroactively justifies the marriage.

    The next turn comes with the narrative focus of the novel. Following Isabel’s marriage, roughly halfway through the book, the focus moves away from her and shifts towards her step-daughter Pansy’s own courtship woes. The novel is much more about her suitors and her father’s response to them. Again, James pulls the rug from under us; unlike the marriage plots propounded roughly thirty years earlier through figures like the Brontёs, which were like Bildungsromans centered on a key figure’s life, James absconds with the plot of the book and hands it over to Pansy. 

    These moments of deviation from standard Victorian plots, in mind, speak to an early modernist ethic and hint at something more in James’ ambitions for the book. A moment ago, I suggested that James absconded with the plot and I use that phrase to attribute him a strange omnipresent quality on purpose. One of the other strange approaches of the book is that it is, for the most part, narrated from a third person omniscient perspective, sometimes excessively exploited to explore the interiority of characters. Yet, a few hundred pages in I started to notice more first person commentary cropping up. The narrator is ambiguous: sometimes a character’s innermost thoughts are revealed while later the narrator says something like “I cannot say” or “we cannot see” over a character’s shoulder while they read a letter. There is a blur of authorial construction, audience complicity, godlike powers, and so on. Imagine italics and all caps for the question “who is narrating this thing?!” I don’t know how significant these fast and loose narratological strategies James meant this to be, but it feels like a strangely subversive move.

    Incidentally, the novel becomes more predictable as it wears on. Most chapters are pages of (overlong) interiority, analyzing all aspects of a character’s thought process followed by a few pages of dialogue. James then rinses and repeats. The pattern wears a little thin, but ultimately I think the book follows Brian Cox’s advice as Robert McKee in Charlie Kaufmann’s 2002 film Adaptation: “You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

    Surprising to me is that, especially early in the novel, the dialogue has a pseudo-philosophical quippy-ness that is the prototypical British register. I was going to suggest that James was drawing from the Wilde popularity of his contemporary Oscar, but it appears to me that most of Wilde’s works were staged after the publication of The Portrait of a Lady. What makes that even more peculiar and exciting to me is that Wilde is famously an aesthete who cares only for the finer things in life, which is the case for Isabel Archer’s husband Osmond, who is just the worst. In Wilde, the cleverness is an extension of his aestheticism. Here, the aesthete character is misaligned with cleverness, so it’s an odd disconnect that warrants further academic exploration in the many lives I don’t live.

    On the topic of unlived lives, it’s painful to watch Isabel Archer’s life play out for the worse when so many other possibilities existed for her. In particular, her bond with her cousin Ralph is the most beautiful connection in the book. Ralph admires her spirit and when his father dies, he convinces him to leave her a significant amount of his wealth. In Ralph’s mind, it liberates Isabel. If she marries, he wants her to marry without a financial incentive, but he also doesn’t want her to know that he has made these arrangements for her because her independence will reject his support. The tenderness of Ralph’s care is beautiful, albeit ill-fated: having money is precisely one of the draws of Isabel for Osmond, who can expend her wealth adding to his collections. In my notes for the book, I wrote that I would have liked to have seen the fake inheritance storyline developed more fully. I wanted to see that confrontation, but the thread was unaddressed—like the rationale for marrying Osmond, like Isabel’s miscarriage. Ironically, the thread was picked up hundreds of pages later and it does form a central turn in the book when Isabel learns that Ralph had manipulated her fate.

    Despite Ralph’s loving gesture backfiring, and despite him not really being a suitor to Isabel, their love was the most wonderful part of the book to me. To return to the idea of “wow[ing] them in the end,” the last act of the book is a tour de force. Ralph is dying back home in London (Isabel is living in Italy by this point) and she is determined to go see him before his death. Osmond forbids it, intimating that the split will be everlasting. Isabel thus steals away secretly and her goodbyes to the nunnery-ified Pansy are beautifully done. Before, she learns some other secrets that I won’t spoil, and while the particular revelations are a little lacklustre by today’s standards, the ending nonetheless feels powerful. Her reunion with Ralph and his death are a tragic, but fitting, end. Ultimately, the book ends with a sense of irresolution, but that seems completely consistent with the point of view James has demonstrated towards life throughout the rest of the book.

    Let me focus for a moment, though, on Ralph. The sickly figure perseveres for the sake of Isabel. The devotion to her feels so sincere and pure: “He wanted to see what she would make of her husband—or what her husband would make of her. This was only the first act of the drama, and he was determined to sit out this performance. His determination had held good; it had kept him going some eighteen months more, till the time of his return to Rome with Lord Warburton. It had given him indeed such an air of intending to live indefinitely that Mrs. Touchett, though more accessible to confusions of thought in the matter of this strange, unremunerative—and unremunerated—son of hers that she had ever been before, had, as we have learned, not sculpted to embark for a distant land. If Ralph had been kept alive by suspense it was with a good deal of the same emotion—the excitement of wondering what state she would find him—that Isabel mounted to his apartment the day after Lord Warburton had notified her of his arrival in Rome” (392). First, see what I mean by the many-claused sentences? Second, I love that Ralph sees the position as one of suspense. 

    The ultimate moment is when Ralph is returning to London to die. The most romantic passage in the book, and the most beautifully tender passages I’ve read in some time is not even one of Isabel’s suitors:

    “They stood together a moment; both her hands were in both of his.

    ‘You’ve been my best friend,’ she said.

   'It was for you that I wanted – that I wanted to live. But I’m of no use to you.'

    Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept that; she could not part with him that way. ‘If you should send for me I’d come,’ she said at last.

    'Your husband won’t consent to that.’

    'Oh yes, I can arrange it.’

    'I shall keep that for my last pleasure!’ said Ralph.

   In answer to which she simply kissed him.” (497).

The intimacy in their friendship is so loving and Ralph expressing his devotion to her is Cyrano-level sweetness. The fact that he reserves his last living pleasure as their reunion is just the most heartbreaking-slash-heartwarming moment that feels contemporary despite being from a dry 19th century novel. 

    Aside from the romance, there are a number of ethical dimensions to the work. In my Philosophy of Literature course during my undergraduate, I remember an essay (title and author pending—sorry, folks) that was discussing what made art good. The author examines the ethical dimension of art and elevates Henry James’ The Golden Bowl as a moral work from which we can learn, beauty not necessarily withstanding. In The Portrait of a Lady, we are presented with some models of ethical behaviour and their consequences, sometimes for better and sometimes for the worse. For instance, Pansy has a devotion to her father’s wishes and when she shows the least sign of disobedience she is shipped back to the nunnery.

    There are two central ethical dilemmas that were most compelling. The first revolves around Lord Warburton, one of Isabel Archer’s former suitors. Long after being rejected, he visits Italy and meets Isabel’s step daughter Pansy. He falls in love with her and wants to pursue her marriage. Meanwhile, Isabel has to navigate the intricacies and contingencies of the situation. James writes, “If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature’s own—was this the service her husband had asked of her? [...] She asked herself with dismay wether Lord Warburton were pretending to be in love with Pansy in order to cultivate another satisfaction and what might be called other chances” (419). There’s a peculiar dynamic here where Isabel has to decide whether Lord Warburton is not pursuing Pansy duplicitously. Isabel must decide whether to use Pansy as a pawn and essentially sacrifice her to marriage with Lord Warburton to ensure that his advances are not directed her way. It’s the sort of Kantian ethical impulse to decide whether we use people as means to ends or as ends in themselves.

    James approaches a similar question from a different angle in the marriage between Isabel and Osmond. When James ultimately expounds on Isabel’s rationale for marrying Osmond, he describes his “indefinable beauty” (422) but that at the same time he was “helpless and ineffectual.” She then experiences contradictory sensations towards him, feeling “a tenderness which was the very flower of respect.” James embellishes the description, calling him “a sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward and yet not putting to sea” (422). She then takes a “maternal strain” towards him. She reflects that the money bequeathed to her was at the core of her care for him, but in her generosity there’s also a self interest: “At bottom her money had been a burden, had been on her mind, which was filled with the desire to transfer the weight of it to some other conscience, to some more prepared receptacle. What would lighten her conscience more effectually than to make it over the man with the best taste in the world?” (422). There’s a contradictory impulse within her: she wants to provide for Osmond, but at the same time in doing so she relieves her own burden. In moments like that, it’s curious whether they are treating each other as ends or means. (Subtitle for another boring essay I’ll never write: “Kantian Ethics at Work in the Work of Henry James”). 

    Truth be told, I hadn’t intended to write such a lengthy review of a book that is, in many ways, a straightforward and simple story. Perhaps it’s just because the book is so long and I was forced to spend so much time with it, but I think the more charitable approach is to give Henry James credit where it’s due. The Portrait of a Lady has a number of subtle, nuanced components that make for a ‘classic’ novel. While James seems to be falling from favour in the academy (correct me if I’m wrong), there are still some quiet innovations in his work that are worthwhile for book enthusiasts to explore.

    Happy reading and happy exploration!