Opening
The novels opens with pure imagery. A portrait of the Hale farm that divorced from context or individual perspective. The universal collective pronoun is applied, the language is stark and spare, the sentence short and vivid. It is elegiac and sets a tone of wistful loss and with a strange conveyance of the idea that innocence is part of that absence:
“Always the farm sings for us, its lost families, its soldiers and wives. During the war, when they came with their bayonets, forcing their way in, their muddy boots on the stairs. Patriots. Gangsters. Husbands. Fathers. They slept in the cold beds. They raided the cellar for jars of canned peaches and sugar beets. They made great fires in the field, the flames twisting, snapping up to the heavens. Fires that laughed. Their warm faces glowing and their hands warm in their pockets. They roasted pig and pulled the sweet pink meat from the bone. After, they sucked the fat from their fingers, the taste familiar, strange.”
Complicity with the Patriarchy
George Clare is the type of man who displays a comfort with patriarchal thinking without making much effort, but also at times in a way that disarms anyone who might notice. There is a certain type of woman that this type of man should not conceivably marry—for his sake. And then there is a certain type of woman who is complicit in maintaining patriarchal philosophy without manifesting it outward signs of obvious submission. This is the type of woman men like George Clare should not marry—for the sake of the woman. Which of these types might Caroline Clare be?
“Their mother had raised them to be good wives, to make the best of thing...and Catherine had bought into it with a greedy, childish ease. The women on her side were devoted wives and mothers. They distracted themselves from minor bouts of unhappiness with housecleaning, gardening, children. They tore recipes from magazines and copied them down on index cards. They made Bundt cakes and Jell-O molds and casseroles, cleaned closets, organized drawers, folded laundry, darned socks. They’d mollify their husbands with sex."
Ghosts
This is not a ghost story in the traditional concept of the genre. It isn’t even a haunted house story, for that matter. The experience of reading it is, however, somewhat akin to being a character in such stories. At least, being a character in such a movie in the first third. You know, when weird things start happening and suspicions are raised, voice, and ridiculed, but before the ghosts start arriving to prove the character isn’t crazy. Reading it is kind of like that in that it builds this tension where the reader just knows that eventually the ghosts are going start appearing, but also knows they won’t because, after all, this is not a ghost story:
“Unlike her cynical husband, she’d been inside enough creepy houses to believe in the possibility of ghosts or, as the experts called them, entities. Sometimes you just got a feeling. Like stepping into ice water, your whole body went rigid. She’d felt it herself at the farm when she’d gone in to clean up right after the accident. She’d stripped their bed and put the bundle of sheets on the back seat of her car, and, driving home that afternoon, she had the strangest feeling that Ella was sitting back there…and she kept looking in her rearview mirror, half expecting to meet her eyes.”
The Dangerous Type
What is George Clare? Is he a narcissist? Is he a psychopath? Is he just misunderstood, maybe? Things are slowly together for Willis, who should know. But then, again, maybe she should have caught on just a little quicker, maybe?
“Often, very late at night, she’d hear the sound of the cassette player…her strange little bedtime stories. The voices of the bad people, she often thought, putting her to sleep at night. There were things she noticed about these statements, how they spoke and the stories they told. There were certain consistencies. Phrases repeated. Particular manners of speech. Her father had told her that a true sociopath has the ability to convince himself that he’s innocent. So everything that comes out of his mouth rings true to him, and usually to everyone else…so good at it they can pass a lie-detector test…these people—people like George—were predatory. They had skills of perception that regular people lacked. Maybe because, unlike most people, they knew what they needed and weren’t afraid to admit it. Survival skills. So they could go out and do it again.”
