GRANGE HOUSE
By Sarah Blake
Picador USA, 376 pages, $24
It is summer 1896, and Maisie Thomas arrives with her parents for yet another sojourn at Grange House, a quarry owner’s former mansion on the coast of Maine that is now an elite summer hotel. This year’s visit will distinguish itself from idylls past, however, for 17-year-old Maisie is filled with fresh yearning, with a longing to open and be opened by the vast, almost panoramic possibilities of the world. Her confidante is Miss Nell Grange, a charismatic figure presiding over Grange House. What Maisie does not care to hear or be subject to is another common love story where yet another woman proceeds down the conventional path from love to marriage and the birthing room. What Maisie longs for is the rare tale of quest that will give her own life direction and definition, for she feels at once unmoored by nameless yearnings and anchored to conventional expectations. What she will receive are overlapping stories, potent mixes of phantasm and fact, beginning the morning she first wakes at Grange House to the discovery of a pair of drowned lovers found in the water nearby, their arms clasped tightly around each other.
Against this tragic backdrop, Maisie’s relationship with Nell Grange grows increasingly complex and urgent as the older, ailing woman entrusts Maisie with the task of finishing or solving certain family stories. On their walks together, Nell insists Maisie must complete or divine the truth about these stories. In “Grange House,” Sarah Blake’s compelling and highly accomplished first novel, storytelling has a power akin to exorcism and love is a fate haunted by the past.
With rich, meticulous detail and a poet’s refined yet sensuous ear for language, Blake, a Chicago area resident, has composed a novel that manages to partake of all the conventions of Victorian sensibility while maintaining a contemporary intelligence and subtle wit. Using a delightfully intricate narrative strategy, Blake employs the forces of nature, the supernatural and human relationship in an erotic triangulation; indeed, Eros and its shadow, Thanatos, are never far from one another in this novel. The ghost begets the lover, the lover begets the ghost, and all thrive on the magnetic impact of one set of triangular relationships superimposed upon another.
In the foreground is the more shallow story of Maisie and her two suitors, the businessman Jonathan Lanman and the travel writer Bart Hunnowell. Their story is initially illumined but then eclipsed by the background mystery of the relationship among Maisie’s father, her mother and Nell Grange. The past must be set right, the author seems to suggest,before the present can exist as anything but an echo and repetition of the buried past. “Grange House” is both a novel of suspense and ideas, full of literary references and quiet erudition. Blake presents provocative notions about truth, history, fate, memory and imagination. Grange House itself it beautifully evoked as an environment of stability and elegance, a polished, fixed stage for generations of players who inhabit the house. The novel demonstrates how porous and permeable the boundary is between the living and the dead and how one can be haunted by one’s own unlived lives, the rooms one hesitated before, then passed by.
Reading this novel, one feels the spectral force exerted by what we did not do, how the negative power of truth suppressed from one generation influences the behavior and actions of the next. This is an almost ecologically conceived Victorian novel, insisting on the interrelatedness not just of nature and all living beings but of the supernatural and the natural. As Nell Grange says to Maisie, “Every story begins in a graveyard.”
Sarah Blake’s great feat in this first novel is not her eloquent restoration of time and place, not her deft plotting and telescopic unfolding of a suspenseful tale (though these are worthy of high admiration), but the overall collapsing of time and history. The novel suggests that we have to free ourselves from the concealed or untold stories of the past. Here is truly a notion to appeal to our accelerated times, a riddle of ineffability gorgeously wrapped in the antique tapestry of a superb Victorian tale.
