A Reunion of Ghosts is one of the New York Post’s “This Week’s Must-Read Books.” I’m very grateful–thank you, NY Post–but am kind of worried that the Post may be having a bad week: they’ve included my novel about suicide along with three non-fiction books about, respectively, Nazi concentration camps, massacre, and rain. Bummer. Or maybe this is all a ploy to drive up sales for the book about office supplies.
I’m absolutely thrilled by this insightful review by Rebecca Abrams for The Financial Times of London and also by the accompanying illustration by Simon Pemberton.
Here is the review’s final paragraph:
A Reunion of Ghosts is a very funny book but it is also tender, sombre and thought-provoking. Narrated in the first-person plural, it is often impossible to tell which of the sisters is telling the story, their identities and experiences merged into one collective voice — and yet questions of individuality and self-determination are omnipresent. Where do we as individuals stop and start? Can we escape the ghosts of the past? Can we shake off the lifeless beliefs that bind us? What is the nature of their power? Is it just a matter of how we tell the story, of what we give weight to, what we choose to ignore? Are we the playthings of the gods, or the deus ex machina in our own scripts? For Vee Alter, “the meaning of life had always been that life had no meaning, and the moral of the story was that there was no moral of the story. Things that seemed significant weren’t.” Whether author or reader agree with her is another matter entirely.
A new and enthusiastic review for A Reunion of Ghosts, this one from by BBC contributor Hephzibah Anderson and appearing in London’s The Jewish Chronicle. the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper. My favorite line says that Reunion is a “master-class in tragi-comedy (that) sustains its anarchic tempo until the very end.” Anarchic tempo. I love that.
Some lovely newspaper aggregator has spread the Dallas Morning News review of A Reunion of Ghosts far and wide. It’s been picked up and reprinted in a bunch of newspapers including, among others The Kansas City Star, The Lexington-Herald Leader, The Charlotte Observer, The Telegraph (Macon, Georgia), and several throughout South Carolina. It also appears in several Spanish papers.
…and, in one very strange case, it seems to have been translated into some other language before being translated back into English. In this version, rather than being an English Professor, I’m a “British Professor,” somehow “Son of Sam” comes out as “Boy of Mike,” and my first novel, The Last Day of the War, comes out as The Final Times of World War Two Inch.
Stylist Magazine gave A Reunion of Ghosts five stars and the crown in their weekly Book War…though they loved its arch-rival The Ladies of the House as well, which, based on the description, I’m now dying to read.
The UK’s Daily Mail has been kind enough to publish this “favourable” review of A Reunion of Ghosts:
Lady, Vee and Delph Alter are three sisters who share an apartment in Manhattan — and each others’ lives.Introverted, reclusive and unlucky in love, the three sisters readily assume they have been afflicted by the curse that has blighted their family ever since their great-grandfather invented poison gas as a chemical weapon. Delph has made a chart of their family’s deaths — ‘suicide: gunshot, suicide: morphine, suicide: auto-defenestration . . .’
Now, in the latter half of 1999, with Millennium Night approaching and Vee dying of cancer, the three sisters resolve to keep up the family tradition — they will kill themselves at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Before they leave this world together, the sisters decide to write this book, a collective effort designed to show the workings of their family’s curse from their ancestors to themselves.
However, as they’re preparing for their big and final day, another relative turns up to throw their plans into disarray.
A book about suicide, written by three damaged characters hell-bent on self-destruction? It may not sound a barrel of laughs, but this is not only poignant and moving, but genuinely funny — with the humour ranging from the darkest comedy to some superbly silly puns.
The Sunday Arts Section of the Singapore newspaper The Straits Times features a lengthy review of A Reunion of Ghosts, which I’ve included here because I think it may be behind a paywall (I kind of can’t tell). The Straits Times also reprinted the great review I got from the UK’s Daily Mail the other day and is going to publish an interview with me. In short, I am very high on The Straits Times.
A Reunion Of Ghosts is a woman’s history of the 20th century, a story of scientific advancement, sexual inequality and the suicidal impulse of humanity to move from disaster to disaster in the name of progress.
It is no coincidence that the narrators are three sisters whose deepest attachment is to each other rather than to a partner or child, for such relationships might anchor them to the present and interest them in the future.
However, accident and tragedy still befall Lady, Vee and their “baby” sister Delph Alter, leaving them man-less, childless and devastated by the spectre of Vee’s cancer at the cusp of the millennium. In their 40s and not desiring to survive each other, the sisters decide to pen their family history and die together before the year 2000 dawns.
Their planned death on Dec 31, 1999, will symbolise the end of one of the most important periods of advancement in human history, which their family can claim to have shaped.
The sisters’ great-grandfather Lenz created nitrogen fertilisers to increase crop production and reduce food shortages, but he also designed the chemical gas used by Germany against Allied troops in World War I.
It was a horribly ironic first step towards the gas used by the Nazis to kill Jews in concentration camps and a discovery that deforms the rest of the family tree. From Lenz’s wife Iris to their son Richard and their granddaughters – including the sisters’ mother – every member of the family chooses an early death out of guilt or the manic depression which seems to accompany each person’s above-average mental faculties.
The sisters’ book-length family history is a suicide note and an attempt to untangle their complicated identity. In the same way as 20th-century society went from being centred on religion to focusing on science, and eventually a self-centred fatalism and general apathy towards the rest of humanity, the Alters have gone “from God to bones to nothing”.
Lenz denied his Jewish heritage, brought up on the popular sentiment of the time to choose instead pride and blind faith in his country Germany, but was eventually ostracised for the heritage he had forsworn.
His wife Iris was pushed in a different direction, towards denying her considerable academic talent and rare doctorate in chemistry for the domestic sphere.
She took her life out of frustration as well as disgust at what her husband had created. It is worth noting that her character is based on the real-life German chemist Clara Immerwahr, wife of Nobel Prize-winner Fritz Haber, the inventor of fertilisers and poison gas.
From “bones to nothing” is the next step of devolution. The sister-authors of the narrative admit they have accomplished absolutely nothing of note because their lives are bound up in making sense of their history rather than moving on from the past.
In spite of this, A Reunion Of Ghosts is not a tragedy or even a sad book.
The second novel of American author Judith Claire Mitchell and coming 10 years after her first, it is a delightfully cheeky and subversive story, highlighting what is either deliberately hidden or overlooked in the accepted narrative of history: the contributions of a scientist’s equally qualified wife to his published research, for example, or the price of genius.
Take one of the most unsettling parts of the book, a contract the famous physicist Albert Einstein made his first wife Mileva sign in return for his agreeing to continue their marriage – he would eventually divorce her and marry his cousin Elsa. In the contract, reproduced from an actual document, Mileva is to agree to forgo his company at home or in public, to expect no intimacy and to stop talking to him at his request.
Genius can be allowed its foibles, is the message, unless of course, the genius is female. Mileva was the only female allowed into the same school as Albert, at a time when society did not sanction feminine presence outside the domestic sphere, but today, historians remain divided as to whether she contributed to Albert’s early research.
Mitchell makes these and other terrible truths palatable through humour, the same death-row brand that Iris and her peers use to confront the banality and uselessness of their lives.
Down three generations and Lady, Delph and Vee revel in their uselessness, citing the blackness of their family’s past and the orderly truncation of the family tree as reason to live lightly and without thought for the future, to hold no aspirations or dreams, to look forward to exiting the world and closing the chapter on their once-illustrious, once-maligned, now forgotten family name.
When they end, the 20th century will end as well. A chapter will close, but this is not cause for mourning since another will start – literally, towards the end of the novel, and it is a chapter with all the bright optimism of the last 100 years revived.
The Last Day Of The War by the same author (2005, Anchor, $31.30), another black comedy. Towards the end of World War I, an 18-year-old Jewish girl falls in love, follows an American soldier overseas and takes up the cause of the Armenians massacred in 1915.
Many thanks to The Dallas Morning News for their effusive review of A Reunion of Ghosts:
By MARTHA SHERIDAN
Staff Writer
What’s so funny about three sisters bent on committing suicide? Plenty, in the imagination of Judith Claire Mitchell.
Mitchell, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, is an English professor and director of the master’s of fine arts creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first novel was The Last Days of the War, a love story filled with facts about the 1915 Armenian massacres. In A Reunion of Ghosts, the author returns to basing her fiction on fact, with the fictional Alter family haunted by the legacy of the sisters’ great-grandfather, who developed the murderous chlorine gas Germany unleashed in World War I.
The novel’s fictional great-grandparents are closely based on real-life inventor Fritz Haber and his wife, Clara. He was honored for his work on man-made nitrogen fertilizer, but Clara, a brilliant chemist in her own right, withered under the responsibilities of motherhood in the shadow of her famous husband. She killed herself in protest over his work in gas warfare.
The Alter sisters’ story opens with a tattoo that the youngest, Delph, has around her calf. At first glance it “looks like a serpentine chain, but stand closer and it’s actually sixty-seven tiny letters and symbols that form a sentence — a curse: the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd and 4th generations.”
The novel is a long, darkly witty suicide note set near the dawn of 2000. Themes include the pleasures and burdens of family, women in academia, romantic love, introversion and religion.
Mitchell offers a family tree to help sort out who’s who in the fictional family. There’s also a chart identifying the circumstances of the six who committed suicide between 1915 and 1975 and a list of the names mentioned in the book, with several real historical figures highlighted in bold (hello, Albert Einstein, Son of Sam and Frank Zappa).
An author’s note emphasizes that the Alter sisters are not intended to resemble real persons, but the fictional sisters certainly ring true; they have human foibles and flaws that can be fatal.
The sisters’ father, Natan Frankl, abandoned his family when daughters Lady, Vee and Delph were children, leaving the girls with little more than his love for puns. The sisters ditched his surname in favor of their matronymic, Alter, “and Delph repeatedly described the name change as no big deal, just a slight Alter-ation, you can’t punish her for being punnish. … In no other way did he provide for us or, apparently, care about us. In fact, you might say that Frankl, our dad, didn’t give a damn.”
Lady’s three suicide attempts are chronicled; in one of them she attempts to hang herself from a pipe in their New York apartment building’s basement. The rusty pipe collapses under her weight, resulting in a mess that prompts Lady to predict: “Someday this will be funny.”
Vee’s story echoes her great-grandmother’s struggle with prejudice against women. Despite generations of advancements in women’s rights, Vee sits in a 1970s English class at Columbia, “where the professor, forced to admit Barnard women for the first time, refused to call on said women, thus reasserting the masculine hegemony, or as we put it back then, his male chauvinist piggery.” Vee’s life story takes especially tragic turns.
The deeply introverted Delph’s misery is summarized while she is getting the tattoo. A friend tells the tattoo artist that while her great-grandfather was a “notorious loudmouth,” Delph has “trouble talking in front of people she doesn’t know.” The Alter sisters cannot catch a break, he says, prompting comparisons to the Kennedys.
Perhaps the central plot question is whether the sisters will save each other. Hope floats on several passages, including one in which they realize that killing themselves means they’ll never learn to stop “deflecting important conversations with jokes.”
“We’d lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women.” Mitchell understands that the failure to live up to that potential is no joke.
For Books’ Sake, the British feminist zine, has published a lovely review of A Reunion of Ghosts. Because I do get that this is not a book that will appeal to everyone–it’s about suicide and chlorine gas, for heaven’s sake–it’s very gratifying when it does hit with the kind of reviewer who is not just offering personal opinion, but who brings a thoughtful and knowledgeable literary perspective to her criticism. Many thanks to Bethany Rose for writing such a review.
I’m very grateful to the novelist, poet, and literary critic Kelly Cherry for this review. The review is not available online or at very many news stands or libraries, though you can download the issue of The Hollins Critic that includes the review here for only $2.99.
I have been searching for a single adjective with which to describe Judith Claire Mitchell’s second novel. Stunning, amazing, brilliant, splendid are all accurate, but not accurate enough. I want an adjective that will encompass a funny book about the Holocaust. A funny book that is about the Holocaust and the nature of time. A funny book that is about the Holocaust, the nature of time, and causality or the absence of causality. Not to mention that it’s also about love and loneliness. You see my dilemma. But it’s my dilemma, not the author’s. The author has found ways to bring together contradictions we might have expected to fly apart. Her novel exists as a rare unity, and rather like an Ethiopian wife bearing river-washed laundry, she balances it all on her head.
Albert Einstein and his marital problems turn up here, but I have to point to physicist Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle to discuss what Mitchell has wrought. The complementarity principle states that phenomena can have mutually exclusive properties, the prime example being an electron, which may be both wave and particle. But the principle outgrew its initial referent and became the notion that a field, or subject, is always adjacent to another field or subject we tend to block out. Not blocking out what is there is what the complementarity principle reminds us to do. We must take in the whole. We must see it, and understand it, as a whole. Hence, humor; hence, tragedy. Hence, now; hence, then.
For the novel travels back to Germany and Poland, to two world wars, to the chemist who developed the gas, Zyklon, that would be used in the wars, and in crematoria to murder Jews, Gypsies, gays, and political dissidents, particularly but not exclusively Communists. The chemist’s descendants include the three sisters who tell their story in this novel. “How do three sisters write a single suicide note?” As the collective author tells us, “The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.” One of the pleasures of Mitchell’s book is a cheeriness that may function as a whistling in the dark but always presents itself first as wicked good humor.
The three sisters live in their deceased mother’s rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive. They are Lady, Vee (for “Veronica”), and Delph. They are short and curvy with bushy hair. Extremely bushy hair. Big boobs, big butts, big hair, but small overall. For the most part, the trio prefer their own company to that of others. They are acutely aware and ashamed of their mutual ancestor, the chemist, and the rampant history of suicides among their forebears. They also accept at face value the biblical passage that states, in both Exodus and Numbers, that “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations.” Lady, Vee, and Delph are the fourth generation.
Despite—or because of—these grim and, as Freud would have said, overdetermined realities, the sisters can joke, dance, comfort one another, and, for better or worse, stand steadfast to their truth.
Is it everyone’s truth? No. But we read this emotionally involving, masterfully structured, intelligent novel to learn about the characters’ truth, not ours. Though, in the way of Niels Bohr, A Reunion of Ghosts invites us to examine our own truths. What is good? What is evil? What do we owe to history? What do we owe to others? To ourselves? These are questions we must try to answer. Too few novels raise them. This novel, raising these questions, will be for many the first step on a journey to wisdom.
And the adjective I was looking for? Sapient.
— Kelly Cherry