Sometimes a book just seems to appear out of nowhere, and then become ubiquitous overnight. That’s been the case with The Ghost at the Table, which I read a review of last week and am now seeing everywhere.
The Ghost at the Table, by Suzanne Berne, is a novel about a family’s Thanksgiving dinner in Concord, MA. According to The Washington Post, it’s a novel about "the way we shape and sanctify our memories and then allow those memories to control us." The narrator is a single woman who had an unhappy childhood. Her mother died when she was 13, and her father quickly remarried and sent her and her sister off to boarding school. The book takes place when her sister convinces her to retun to Concord for Thanksgiving and to let the past stay in the past. The Post review continues:
What follows is a witty, moving and psychologically astute story about siblings and the disparate ways they remember common experiences from childhood. Cynthia arrives to find that she’s been tricked by her sister into playing the leading role in a heartwarming holiday reconciliation with their father. But she wants no part of this, and their father has been reduced by illness to a grumpy sphinx. Meanwhile, all the other guests — nieces, husbands, roommates, office colleagues and a tutor — have their own unattainable visions of the perfect holiday to enforce on the group. Sound familiar? Pass the gravy, please.
What intrigues me about this book is what the Post calls the "proxy battle" between the two sisters over their childhood. Whose memories will prevail, and will they ultimately replace those of the other sister?
Entertainment Weekly gave The Ghost at the Table an A, saying, "With the lightest of touches, Berne turns a witty tale of holiday dysfunction into a transfixing borderline gothic, her appealing heroine into an unreliable narrator seething with decades-old resentment."
Seething resentment…? What could be a more appropriate dish for Thanksgiving dinner?
If you’d like to read more reviews, here is one from today’s Boston Globe.