Grief Cottage by Gail Godwin

Published by Bloomsbury USA on June 6, 2017

Marcus is ten when his mother dies in an accident. He is sent to live with his great aunt Charlotte, a woman he has never met. Charlotte lives in a beach cottage on a South Carolina island and makes a living painting island landscapes. One of her most popular paintings is of Grief Cottage at the far end of the beach. Before it was partially destroyed in a fire, the cottage was occupied for the summer by a young boy and his parents. The parents died in a storm while searching for the boy, whose body was never found.

Charlotte is reclusive and not particularly interested in, or capable of, raising a ten-year-old boy. Marcus knows he is intruding on her privacy, and while Charlotte does not intend to make Marcus feel unwelcome in her home, Marcus has reason to believe that he is a burden, no matter how helpful he tries to be. Mostly, he tries to stay away so Charlotte can enjoy her solitude. Long walks on the beach to Grief Cottage are a logical way to spend his time.

Gail Godwin’s cover blurb warns the reader that Grief Cottage is a ghost story, but it is primarily the story of Marcus’ struggle to understand his life. Marcus was uprooted once, while his mother was still alive, after he inflicted a savage beating on a friend. This new change in his life, following his mother’s death, might in some ways be welcome as a new beginning.

Is Grief Cottage haunted? Marcus sees the ghost of a boy at the ruins of the cottage, but perhaps he is seeing the manifestation of his own grief. The ghost makes only rare appearances, creating a frame for the rest of Marcus’ experiences on the island.

The reader encounters quite a few digressions in Grief Cottage, from biographical snippets about Alec Guinness (who, like Marcus, did not know his father’s identity) to details of the invented island and its history. Some of the digressions help build setting and flesh out characters, but after a point, they impede the story’s development. On the other hand, information about erosion of the beach and (sometimes futile) efforts to preserve historic places establish the themes of change and resistance to change by hanging onto the past that pervade the novel.

Some aspects of Grief Cottage, particularly certain characters, are a wee bit too pretentious. For example, Marcus spends time with an aging bedridden woman who is engaged in a self-absorbed archeology of herself and has a good cry when she realizes that no self can ever share their entire being with another self. Similar wisdom imparted by other island inhabitants is difficult to endure, simply because it is unrelenting.

Aunt Charlotte often tells Marcus that he is too good to be true. I shared that sentiment. Too good, too thoughtful, too helpful, too courteous. Godwin makes clear that his goodness is motivated by fear of rejection (and by being raised by a caring mother), but his goodness also makes Marcus dull, despite the drama he has endured.

Other aspects of Grief Cottage just didn’t work for me. After spending the novel being a tortured model of goodness, Marcus is inhabited by an imaginary gremlin who coaxes him to do something mildly bad and then punishes him with a self-destructive impulse. The gremlin, unlike the ghost, struck me as a plot device rather than a mental construct that Marcus would actually devise. And since Marcus’ voice, or at least his internal voice, is that of adult with an Ivy League education, I couldn’t accept it as belonging to a middle school boy. In fact, everyone in the novel speaks in the same voice, which seems false given their varying backgrounds.

Still, there is no doubt that Gail Godwin is among the most elegant writers in current literature, and the novel bears reading simply for its graceful language. Despite my reservations about Marcus, I appreciated Godwin’s insights into the island and the people who inhabit it.

RECOMMENDED

Flora by Gail Godwin

Published by Bloomsbury USA on May 7, 2013 

A keen observer of life, Gail Godwin is both a student and a teacher of human nature. Her novels tend to be probing studies of characters who struggle with their disconnection from the world around them.

At the age of ten (going on eleven), Helen Anstruther has already developed the most disagreeable characteristics of her mother, who died when she was three, and of her grandmother Honora, who has just died. Helen has inherited their haughty sense of superiority, their tendency to see the worst in others. Her mother's twenty-two-year-old cousin, Flora Waring, is recruited to look after Helen during the summer, when Helen's father (a principal during the school year) will be away supervising construction of buildings that will house the Manhattan Project. Although Flora has earned a teaching degree and is hoping for a job offer in the fall, she is woefully insecure, a trait that Helen feeds upon. Helen regards Flora as white trash from Alabama, a hugely embarrassing addition to her life. At the same time, she is blind to the faults of the father and grandmother who raised her.

Two children in town have contracted polio, causing Helen's father to issue an injunction from afar: Helen is not to leave the house. Although Helen complains, she feels a strong connection to the house, still full of her grandmother's things. The house, once a home to recovering tuberculosis patients (less charitably described as "a halfway house for rich malingerers"), is virtually a character in the novel. Helen's isolation isn't truly troubling. She has little use for friends (as one of them complains, she forgets she has them when they aren't around); she lives largely within her own imaginative mind.

Helen parcels out her time, instructing Flora on the art of being a teacher and, when she can, sneaking a peek at the letters her grandmother wrote to Flora over the years -- letters that reveal family secrets in guarded language that Helen isn't old enough to understand. As Helen makes her way through the summer, she develops a crush on the delivery boy from the grocery store, a young man named Finn whose physical and mental issues earned him a medical discharge from the Army. That he is Flora's age does not deter Helen from viewing Flora as an unworthy competitor for his attention.

Every now and then an older voice intrudes, an adult Helen filled with unfashionable remorse as she looks back on that formative summer. The richness of the characters is astonishing, given the novel's brevity. While we usually see Flora through Helen's unreliable eyes, we see her from a different perspective when we read Honora's letters or hear Finn describing her. While Helen is convinced that she is spending her summer educating Flora, it is actually Flora who teaches the novel's most valuable lessons.

Flora is, in fact, the story of the lessons Helen learned from a teacher she despised: that other people's lives are as worthy as her own; that their tragedies are more real, and more serious, than her own self-invented woes; that risking the pain of opening our hearts to others is essential to a fulfilling life. Godwin tells this dramatic story in radiant but understated prose; even a bombshell in the concluding pages explodes quietly. This is a story that touches feelings without obvious manipulation, a book that fills a reader with joy and sorrow in the same instant and leaves the reader wondering how that's possible.

RECOMMENDED

The Perfectionists by Gail Godwin

First published in 1970

This beautifully written, insightful novel focuses on a woman's struggle to understand herself and her marriage during a two week vacation in Majorca. Dane, a journalist, has been married to John, a psychotherapist, for less than a year. Dane describes their marriage as "difficult" in the sense of "challenging." Indeed, it would be a challenge to be married to John, or even to be his friend, for John is constantly analyzing his life and the lives of others. John is given to badgering Dane for "a moment of shared truth" and saying things like "Don't attack the tender shoots of me." John wants Dane to know all of him while Dane wants John to display his attractive qualities while keeping the inner mess to himself (John thinks of the mess as "the natural disorder that precedes growth"). John intellectualizes life until he drains it of vitality, even as he complains that Dane isn't fully experiencing their shared moments. Dane thinks of her marriage as a spaceship carrying them to a destination she cannot yet envision and sometimes she feels that way, while most of the time she feels frustrated with her genius husband. She relies on fantasy and her own resources to have a satisfying time with him in bed.

Joining them on vacation are John's obstinately silent son Robin, the product of a failed relationship with a doctor who broke up with John soon after giving birth, and Penelope, one of John's patients. Dane has the same conflicted feelings about Robin that she has about John. Sometimes she sees him as an all-knowing, mysterious wonder; other times she harbors malevolent thoughts about him and fantasizes about abusing him.

Godwin's writing style is precise, her characters are unique, and her ideas are powerful. This novel deserves a wider audience.

RECOMMENDED