Sutpen's Hundreds Hall

So, there are enough gushing reviews of Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger that it hardly seems worth the trouble to write another one.  But, considering that I haven't read a contemporary novel in almost three years, I thought it awfully significant that I was compelled to read this one, and did so in approximately 48 hours.

This book is really good.  Like, really, really good.  And creepy, and atmospheric, and thought-provoking, and tricky, and imminently fun to read.

In the best ghost story tradition, The Little Stranger makes the ordinary life of a single house suddenly become extraordinarily unsettling.  Is there really a supernatural presence?  Or have the psyches of the home's residents gone rogue and begun manifesting themselves physically?  Or is someone simply playing a dirty trick?

While a few reviewers found this ambiguity to be dissatisfying, I was only once frustrated with the text.  After the first 100 pages or so, when the ghosting kicks in, I was disappointed to read a paragraph in which the spookiness of a mirror come to life is meticulously explained.

"It was all the more sickening, somehow, for the glass being such an ordinary sort of object . . . it made one feel as though everything around one, the ordinary stuff of one's ordinary life, might all at any moment start up like this and - overwhelm one" (150).

Oh, Sarah Waters, why ruin such a nice moment with such over-explanation?  I was prepared not to like the rest of the book, but thankfully, this was my only moment of real irritation.  I'm sure if I read again calmly I'd find other such small details - but it doesn't matter: I was too busy turning pages, and cautiously observing the suspicious night that had snuck up outside my unshaded window to notice them.

The many themes of the text are right up my alley - Post-war England, a great big house that used to employ dozens of servants and now has only three, the family within trying to make sense of their new place within society, and the outsider who tries to find his place within their place.  The war, the legacy of rigid classism, the many lives that had passed through those walls . . . the setting is perfect for Waters's tale, and it puts me in mind of another ghostly story about a post-war declining aristocracy, Absalom!, Absalom! by William Faulkner.  

There are plenty of surface similarities: The house in The Little Stranger is called "Hundreds Hall" and the house in Absalom!, Absalom! is called "Sutpen's Hundred."  Both occur after a cataclysmic war (WWII and the Civil War, respectively), and both are told from the point of view of outsiders who find themselves drawn into the webs being woven and re-woven inside these homes' majestic decay.

Faulkner's masterpiece is a good counter-balance to Waters's thriller.  Faulkner's story unfolds in a swirling mess of narrative asides, parentheses, and re-tellings.  The whirl-pool spins and spins, touching only the edges of the story before sucking you in, down to the bottom where it all rests.  But Waters's linearly (if unreliably) narrated story of memory and place is complemented by Faulkner's drastically un-linear narrative.  Faulkner's maelstrom mimics the storytelling in our own lives.  His text alternately remembers, forgets, and repeats, just as we do so often.  

The ghosts haunting each story may only be the shadows of regret, our yearning for the past, or the inner-selves we repress in the light of society - but that's not going to stop you from looking a little differently at that darkened closet the next time you shut your eyes.

So, with great pleasure I heartily recommend both books!  And would love to hear from anyone else who's read either one.

Cheerio!