As you can imagine, I’m very very happy to be included on the Kirkus Review’s list of the Best Books of 2015.
“Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Mitchell’s dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy with deep empathy and profound wit. For the Alters, life seems to be a seemingly endless series of tragedies; for us the tragedy is that this stunning novel inevitably comes to an end.”
This column in The Philippine Star has its priorities straight. First it comments on the local bar scene. Then it gets to some novels. Of REUNION it says:
A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell (available at National Book Store) Lady, Vee and Delphi Alter are the three middle-aged sisters who turn this darkly humorous novel into a suicide pact note. Great granddaughters to the infamous Lenz Alter — credited for inventing the ammonia gas during the First World War, the first use of chemical warfare — the sisters firmly believe that they carry the curse of the third and fourth generations for that which Lenz had created. But trying to put an end to it all at the stroke of midnight, Dec. 31, 1999, in New York City, is not as easy as it would seem. Seamlessly mixing historical facts (with a change of name) with fresh, illuminating fiction, Mitchell creates a world that is suffused with human drama, comedy and pathos, all in equal measures. While leaving a bittersweet taste, this one delights.
That purple aura over my head suggests that, in addition to the writers Mark Rahe, Daniel Khalastchi and Chloe Benjamin, I was joined at last night’s Monsters of Poetry reading in Madison by a reunion of ghosts.
I’m beyond thrilled to receive this review from the Los Angeles Times.
BookBrunch, the London-based daily newsletter and website about the publishing trade, solicited votes for books that should have been on the longlist for this year’s Man Booker prize. It is very sweet to see REUNION up there along with other also-rans including the latest by Tessa Hadley and Jane Smiley. (But, BookBrunch, it’s Judith CLAIRE Mitchell. You de-claired me!)
We also asked for your suggestions of who should have been on the long list. These titles have been suggested to add to our list:
SOME LUCK by Jane Smiley
THE PAST by Tessa Hadley
ALL INVOLVED by Ryan Gattis
A REUNION OF GHOSTS by Judith Mitchell
WOLF BORDER by Sarah Hall
CJ: Voices of Conservative Judaism out of Los Angeles includes A REUNION OF GHOSTS in its most recent fiction round-up. I’m so grateful for their support…and for the comparison to CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. Wow. (Larry David, call me!)
The Bookshelf
by Lisa SilvermanA Reunion of Ghosts
Judith Claire Mitchell
Harper, 2015; 400 pagesThe title of this absorbing and darkly comic novel refers to a group of ghosts, and it is a very fitting title. Three smart and sardonic sisters, Jewish New Yorkers with a devastating family history, make a decision to kill themselves on the last day of the 20th century. The novel is the treatise they write as a collective suicide note – something their ghostly ancestors (who all died by their own hands) never had the courtesy to leave to them.
Fate has dealt the middle-aged Alter sisters an unlucky hand. The novel moves back and forth in time between their individual lives and devastating losses to the story of their great-grand-father, Lorenz Otto Alter, whose horrifying sins caused the family curse they believe they have inherited. “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd & 4th generations” is the biblical quote tattooed on the calf of Delph, the youngest sister, and the one who most strongly believes in her family’s twisted fate. “Genius and monster,” they write of their ancestor, “he was the scientist who doomed us all.” Delph lives with her older sisters, Lady and Vee, and they describe themselves as a “partner-less, childless and petless sorority.” They intend to end it all in cosmic atonement for their German scientist great-grandfather’s invention of poison gas – the killing machine of World War I and the precursor to Zyklon B. (The character is based on the controversial Fritz Haber – chemist, Jewish-born Lutheran, and friend of Einstein who fled from the Nazis before his sinister chemical concoctions could kill him.) The details of the difficult Alter family legacy give the reader insight into their motivations and we are put in the position of oddly empathizing with their macabre desire while hoping they will find a way out of doing the final deed.
We like the sisters and root for them. It’s true that they are depressed and haunted by the past, but they find droll humor in the darkness. Lady’s first suicide attempt reads like a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Of course, knowing she did not succeed helps, but even she says from her hospital bed: “Someday this will be funny.” And there are laughs through-out the book, from the 19th century portrait of Otto Von Bismarck hanging over the toilet to the offhand inclusion of the travails of Nim Chimpsky, the chimp who knows sign language. The themes of fate, coincidence, family ties and family curses, and the power of genetics are all bound up in the sisters’ smart and acerbic observations. This is what keeps us reading and on edge with hope for their redemption.
David Ebenbach, author most recently of the poetry collection We Were the People Who Moved, has tagged me in The Next Uncomfortable Thing.
What is TNUT? David explains: “A couple of years ago, the big thing on writery blogs was The Next Big Thing, posts in which writers interviewed themselves about their new books. As interviews went, these were pretty friendly situations. The questions were set in advance, and I don’t think anyone pounced on themselves with any vicious “gotcha” journalism moments…But what if the (fictional) interviewer were less sympathetic? What if your interviewer were like a too-honest person who you meet randomly at a party and who’s been drinking a little and who looks at your whole writing life with an attitude somewhere between bafflement and hostility? I think that would be called The Next Uncomfortable Thing, and I think it would be interesting.”
Okay, David. You’ve tagged me and I’m willing to be “it.” But instead of the questions being fictional and the answers genuine, I’ve reversed the process–these are actual, real-live questions that I’ve been asked (okay–maybe not verbatim, but the gist is real) . The answers, however, are ones I’d never have the chutzpah to utter.
TNUT: So, your novel A Reunion of Ghosts is about three sisters who plan to commit suicide together. Is the book autobiographical?
Judy: Yes, it is. My siblings and I all plan to kill ourselves in 1999.
TNUT: Why did you write a book in which every single character is unlikable?
Judy: Um…wow. You really thought every single character was unlikable? What about the cats? You even found the cats unlikable?
TNUT: A Reunion of Ghosts was a People Magazine Book of the Week. In my capacity as a PhD and literary theorist, I am compelled to inquire: did you find it embarrassing to be included in the pages of such a lowbrow publication?
Judy: Totally. If there’s one thing I hate it’s support for my work in a place where 50 gajillion people might see it.
TNUT: Finally, how many books have you sold and how much to do you make per book and how much have you made overall?
Judy: Nobody told me there’d be math.
It feels late to still be receiving reviews, but it also feels very good. This one is from Rob Cline of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, and the writing teacher in me feels compelled to say that it is precisely, succinctly, and gorgeously written. (Would I have been so generous in my comments, if Mr. Cline hadn’t been so generous in his? All I can say is that I hope so!)
August 16, 2015 | 8:00 am
By Rob Cline, correspondent
In Judith Claire Mitchell’s new novel, “A Reunion of Ghosts,” three middle-aged sisters decide to take their own lives on Dec. 31, 1999. In the run up to the fateful date, they pen a book-length suicide note, written in a communal voice, explaining their family’s troubled and troubling history. At the center of that history is their great-grandfather, a German-Jewish chemist responsible for the creation of chemical weapons and the gas used by the Nazis in their death camps.
Mitchell, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and director of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has accomplished an impressive structural, aesthetic and narrative feat. The choral voice of the Alter sisters is perfectly rendered, and Mitchell infuses that voice with a humor that leavens the book’s dark themes and tone.
She also balances historical fact and the requirements of her fictional story with aplomb. As her notes and bibliography attest, she did significant research into the life and family of Fritz Haber, the man who did, in fact, create the weapons ascribed to Mitchell’s fictional Lenz Alter. But she recast the facts of Haber’s life for the purposes of her tale. The history — both real and imagined — is woven seamlessly into the narrative, which consistently focuses on family.
In addition to providing a gripping narrative, “A Reunion of Ghosts” plumbs the depths of some fundamental questions. To what degree are we responsible for and affected by the triumphs and failures of our ancestors? Is the universe driven by chance or is there a force of some sort shaping our experience? How does (and should) one go on when one feels unable to go on?
In the final passages of the novel, Mitchell delivers several surprises and reversals that add emotional weight to what is already a resonant and affecting book. These surprises are executed with care, intended less to shock the reader than to upend expectations in ways that, in retrospect, seem wholly true to the story the Alter sisters have been telling.
“A Reunion of Ghosts” is a significant accomplishment.
It’s interesting to me that while one public high school in a San Francisco suburb literally banned REUNION, refusing to accept it when the school’s book club tried to donate it to the school library, over at Blessed Trinity Catholic High School in Roswell, Georgia, it’s their October book club selection. Wish I could be a fly on the wall–I’d love to hear how high schoolers react to what I like to think is a book with some pretty weighty themes and decided points of view about God and religion.
Join BT’s Book Club. This year, in order to accommodate more literature lovers, we will have two sessions – 9am and one at 7pm. Pick whichever time works best for you!
October 1 – A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell
Three wickedly funny sisters.
One family’s extraordinary legacy.
A single suicide note that spans a century …
Enjoy and happy reading!
A member of a book club that read REUNION wrote to me, wondering if the “horizontal light” that my narrators see when they are feeling suicidal was inspired by this poem by Emily Dickinson. I don’t believe it was–although who knows how our unconscious deals with poetry we may have read decades before?–but I have to say that Dickinson describes in these concise but powerful lines something it took me paragraphs to (try to) capture:
There’s a certain Slant of light, (320)
There’s a certain Slant of light,Winter Afternoons –That oppresses, like the HeftOf Cathedral Tunes –Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –We can find no scar,But internal difference –Where the Meanings, are –None may teach it – Any –‘Tis the seal Despair –An imperial afflictionSent us of the Air –When it comes, the Landscape listens –Shadows – hold their breath –When it goes, ’tis like the DistanceOn the look of Death –
This, opposed to my first reference to the same sort of light during a scene when one of the sisters is recounting an early suicide attempt:
“We’ve all struggled with this: how to explain the desire to do something most people find pathological at best, selfish at worst, incomprehensible always. We sometimes describe it as a chit we were each handed at birth, a card to get out of jail free if one thinks of her life as jail.
“Or we talk about the horizontal light, which is how we refer to the light that sometimes replaces sunlight, the light we see for a brief moment virtually every day, the light that isn’t golden, but is as silver as the nacre inside a seashell, and comes not down from the heavens but from beyond the skyline, oozing and seeping until it lies over the day like an opalescent blanket inviting us to slide beneath it. There’s no telling when we’ll see the horizontal light; it appears at a different time every day, and most days we overlook it—it tends to come and go in an instant—and on other days we see and it lingers, but we manage to ignore it or, at least, after a while, to look away from it.
But then there are the days we can’t look away. “Man, the horizontal light was really strong today,” one of us will say, and the other two will say, “But you resisted,” and the first one will say, “Yeah, well, today I resisted. Who knows about tomorrow?” and we all say, “Who ever knows about tomorrow?” and we refresh our drinks.”
Not putting myself down–I still like my paragraphs and it is, after all, prose that I’m writing, and the language is also in service of a contemporary narrative voice, and yadda yadda yadda–but still…it is just stunning to read that poem. I am definitely doing the “I’m not worthy” bow right now.