In ‘Grief Cottage,’ a Ghost and Other Things That Haunt Us
This content was originally published by SARAH LYALL on 22 May 2017 | 9:50 pm.
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Marcus tends to feel unduly responsible for the people in his life, and he feels responsible for the ghost, too. “It struck me that he might need me to keep faith that he was still there,” he says. “He had been waiting all this time, 50 years Aunt Charlotte had said, for someone to wonder where he was — to miss him after he was gone.”
It’s a classic setup: An isolated child indifferently cared for by a neglectful adult can’t be anything but easy prey for a maybe-malignant supernatural being suffering from unfinished earthly business. The reader expects Marcus to lose his grip, to weaken as the emboldened spirit begins to suck the life out of him. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m thinking particularly of Patricia Clapp’s “Jane-Emily,” one of the great children’s ghost stories, featuring a nasty little dead girl who is not at all pleased when a good little living girl comes to stay in her old house.)
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Gail Godwin
Credit
Dion Ogust
But Godwin is playing a longer, cleverer, more ambitious game. The author of numerous novels, short stories and works of nonfiction, now approaching 80, she remains a forensically skillful examiner of her characters’ motives, thoughts and behavior. “Grief Cottage” revisits some of her favorite themes — fractured families, parentless children, the initial shock and long-term repercussions of death and disappearance, how the future can run off course in a flash — to make the very good point that it doesn’t require a ghost to haunt a life.
Her characters can’t escape the past. Aunt Charlotte, a successful artist and wine-guzzling alcoholic, turns out to be gruff, prickly, good-hearted, concerned about Marcus — and corroded by anger at the terrible things her abusive father did to her. Coral Upchurch, an elderly neighbor, is grief-stricken by the untimely death of her son.
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As for Marcus, he has uncanny insight into his own emotions, extraordinary sensitivity toward others, and a crippling feeling of displacement. He has endured so many losses. These include the loss of the father who died before Marcus was born, and whose identity the boy has never learned. (His mother had always promised to reveal it when he was older.)
There’s the loss of his mother, whom he loved deeply but whose lack of education — she was escaping something in her past, too — restricted her to low-paying jobs and kept them so poor that they had only one bed between the two of them. And there’s the loss, as painful in its own way, of a boy called Wheezer, Marcus’s only friend, after a vicious and irreparable falling-out several years earlier.
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It’s much to Godwin’s credit that she finds a way to weave all these strands together, along with neat little side stories about Marcus’s friendship with Lachicotte Hayes, an older man in the community, and his interest in the imminent hatching of hundreds of loggerhead turtles’ eggs on the beach. In a way, “Grief Cottage” is no more a book about a ghost, really, than “Stand by Me” is a movie about a corpse.
Godwin isn’t one to leave a lot of ambiguity at the end of a novel. “Folks can’t tolerate loose ends — they’ve got to tie up a story,” one of her characters says. Answers even to mysteries we didn’t identify as mysteries are revealed in a coda laying out what other people thought, and what they meant, years after the fact. It’s as if the characters in “Rashomon” got together and compared notes. We’re reminded of how easy it is to mis-ascribe others’ motives, to get things wrong.
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All this is deeply satisfying to the sort of reader who, like me, enjoys a neat ending. “Grief Cottage” is in some ways about the search for meaning in the narratives of our lives — the stories we tell others, and especially the stories we tell ourselves. “I wonder how you’ll look back on this period of your life,” Aunt Charlotte tells Marcus, “how you’ll describe it to someone in the future.” Happily for us, that’s just what he’s done.
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