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Summary
Summary
Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain "devoted"--as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters' long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother's death twenty-five years earlier.
As Thanksgiving Day arrives, with a houseful of guests looking forward to dinner, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic, suspenseful climax.
Author Notes
Suzanne Berne teaches in Harvard University's English department.
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Sisters, living and dead, loom large in Berne's tale of family secrets unraveled. Cynthia Fiske writes a series of historical fiction for girls, depicting the lives of remarkable women through the eyes of their slightly less-remarkable sisters. An invitation to her own sister's house for Thanksgiving in New England coincides with her need to visit Mark Twain's home in Hartford to research a new novel on the writer's daughters, whose story of a charismatic father and three troubled siblings parallels the Fiskes' history. Complicating the usual holiday tensions is the presence of their elderly father, once brash and manipulative, now disabled and facing a divorce from his much-younger wife. As the family struggles with generations of dysfunction and unspoken secrets, including the mysterious death of their mother decades earlier, Cynthia rebels by sharing the most sordid details of the long-gone Clemens family. Although she is nearing middle age, her feelings of isolation and rejection that began in childhood have left her a perpetual adolescent in relation to her family. Much like the child narrator of Donna Tartt's The Little Friend (Knopf, 2002), Berne portrays a confusing, comic, even sinister family dynamic and eschews a pat, happy ending in favor of a very real, if provocative, choice that will appeal to teen fans of family dramas.-Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This taut psychological drama by Orange Prize-winner Berne (A Crime in the Neighborhood) unfolds as San Francisco freelance writer Cynthia Fiske acquiesces to her maternal older sister, Frances, and attends the Thanksgiving family reunion Frances is hosting at her perfectly restored Colonial home in Concord, Mass. Cynthia believes her father, now 82, murdered their invalid mother with an overdose of pills when Cynthia was 13, and she has no wish to ever see him again. Within months after their mother died, their father packed Frances and Cynthia off to boarding school and married the much younger Ilse, a graduate student who worked as part-time tutor to Frances. But now he's suffered a stroke. Ilse is divorcing him, and the family is placing him in a home. Tension is high by the time the assorted guests, including Frances's complicated teenage daughters, her mysterious husband and the speech-impaired patriarch, are called to Frances's table, and it doesn't take much to fan the first flares of anger into the inevitable conflagration. Berne takes an inherently dramatic conflict-one sister's intention to obfuscate the hard truths of the past vs. another's determination to drag them under a spotlight -and ratchets up the stakes with astute observation and narrative cunning. (Oct. 20) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
If an alien - or, say, a non-American - decided to find out about Thanksgiving, and accordingly gleaned his/her/its knowledge from books and films set during the holiday, he/she/it might come to the conclusion that it is the grimmest day of the year. From Hannah and Her Sisters to Walk the Line , Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm and countless others, Thanksgiving can be counted on to serve up a dish of cold family skeletons and simmering resentments. It's hardly surprising: like Christmas in the UK, this is a holiday that gathers far-flung family members and closets them in an overheated house on a cold day when all shops and pubs are closed, then overfeeds and over-liquors them, all in the name of celebrating togetherness, nostalgia and gratitude. What better blueprint for a cataclysmic family row? The two adult sisters at the heart of Suzanne Berne's new novel represent opposite attitudes to Thanksgiving. Frances, the elder, is desperate for everything to be perfect as she takes one more shot at gluing together the broken shards of the Fiske clan. Cynthia, the younger, arrives sullen, already missing her solitary San Francisco flat and dreading the exhumation of the past. She has kept herself aloof from the family since the death of the eldest sister, Helen, but gives in to Frances's entreaties this year because she wants to visit the nearby historic home of Mark Twain - a research project that, it turns out, is much more than academic. That's a fair bit of backstory, and it barely scratches the surface of the Fiskes' deeply scored and pitted history. Historical novelists are often praised for wearing their learning lightly; Berne wears her imagination lightly. The whole book spans merely a long weekend, yet such is the wealth of detail, the depth of feeling, that it has all the force of a blockbuster family saga. The set pieces - and there are many; it's a good 200 pages before we even sit down to dinner - flow past, gradually building up tension. Berne is brilliant at giving you information unobtrusively - better here, even, than in her previous two books: A Crime in the Neighbourhood , which won the Orange prize with its disquieting account of suburban betrayal in the Watergate era, and A Perfect Arrangement , a more intimate portrait of frustrated (in all senses) motherhood. Those books won critical acclaim but this is both larger in scope and more tightly focused. It's certainly more ambitious. Rather than presenting us with a tangled family set-up then unpicking it over the course of the book, she skilfully knots the threads still further, revealing fresh complexities in every chapter - conflicts of loyalty, jealousy, memory. The root of the trouble lies many decades ago in the death of Mrs Fiske, the sisters' mother, from heart failure after a long illness. At the time, the teenage Cynthia had her suspicions, fueled by grief and anger at the "special bond" shared by Frances and her father. She went on the attack: "That soup you gave her? Do you remember how it smelled?" It's the start of a lifetime's worth of hostile questions, which fester unasked at this Thanksgiving. Did she lie when she said she'd phoned the nursing home? Why did that soup smell so odd? Whose side is she on? Frances and Cynthia are constantly at odds and, initially, you find yourself taking sides, too: parental types will nod at Frances's insistence on healing old wounds, while those in touch with their inner teen will sulk along with Cynthia. But it's soon clear that Frances's tales of days gone by are artificially rose- tinted, to the point of being borderline fiction, pathetically concocted to salve her own wounds. Cyn's cynicism seems more perceptive - but are her memories equally tainted, seen through a black haze of bitterness? In fact everything each says and does makes perfect sense, so that your sympathies are held in balance, swaying first to one, then the other. There are no villains here; just life and death, and suspicious circumstances. This would make a perfect Christmas read for anyone dragged back to the family seat - or anyone doing the dragging. Not only is it gripping and hugely satisfying, filled with Berne's characteristic appreciation of small, sensual details, but it reminds you that other families may be in even worse shape than your own. Not least because they have to do Thanksgiving. To order The Ghost at the Table for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-carrie.1 The two adult sisters at the heart of Suzanne Berne's new novel represent opposite attitudes to Thanksgiving. Frances, the elder, is desperate for everything to be perfect as she takes one more shot at gluing together the broken shards of the Fiske clan. Cynthia, the younger, arrives sullen, already missing her solitary San Francisco flat and dreading the exhumation of the past. She has kept herself aloof from the family since the death of the eldest sister, Helen, but gives in to Frances's entreaties this year because she wants to visit the nearby historic home of Mark Twain - a research project that, it turns out, is much more than academic. Frances and Cynthia are constantly at odds and, initially, you find yourself taking sides, too: parental types will nod at Frances's insistence on healing old wounds, while those in touch with their inner teen will sulk along with Cynthia. But it's soon clear that Frances's tales of days gone by are artificially rose- tinted, to the point of being borderline fiction, pathetically concocted to salve her own wounds. Cyn's cynicism seems more perceptive - but are her memories equally tainted, seen through a black haze of bitterness? In fact everything each says and does makes perfect sense, so that your sympathies are held in balance, swaying first to one, then the other. There are no villains here; just life and death, and suspicious circumstances. - Carrie O'Grady.
Kirkus Review
Rivaling sisters search for family truths over a Thanksgiving holiday. Frances Fiske longs for harmony and decides to host a blowout dinner to reunite her estranged family. In her quest for unity, Frances packs the house with high-wattage conflict. When three generations of the Fiske family gather, tempers flair and skeletons begin tumbling out of closets. Out of pity and a sense of obligation, Cynthia Fiske flies east from her sequestered life as a writer to join in her sister's feast. Coming home stirs up bitter memories of a lonely childhood for Cynthia. She narrates the story and at first seems to be a reliable source for learning about the Fiskes' dirty little secrets. Cynthia talks of Frances's rocky marriage, Frances's reckless teenage daughters, Frances's Martha Stewart-like obsession with interior-design perfection. Cynthia relays tales of their mother's mysterious death and their father's romantic indiscretions. A maelstrom develops in the days leading up to the big meal. All the combustible energy makes for a great read as Cynthia and Frances battle it out to preserve a particular view of their childhood. Berne (A Crime in the Neighborhood, 1997, etc.) challenges the reader to pick a side. Cynthia's paranoia creeps through her storytelling and Frances's imperious nature furthers the chaos and miscommunications, making it tough to know whom to trust. Sampling from a few genres--mystery, historical fiction, chick lit and psychological thriller--Berne cooks up a literary feast. Her tactile descriptions and enigmatic characters saturate the story and provide a filling repast. The plot can be frustrating at times--it's a struggle to discern past from present and truth from fiction. But this is intentional. Berne prefers questions to answers. This substantial tale of a dysfunctional family reunion promises a holiday, and a read, to remember. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Berne ( A Crime in the Neighborhood, 1997) sets this unsettling novel in a picture-perfect colonial house in Concord, Massachusetts, during the Thanksgiving holidays. But the family that gathers there is riddled with secrets, jealousy, and guilt. The narrator, Cynthia, is single and a writer for a young-adult series called Sisters of History (or, as her colleague wryly refers to it, hysterical fiction for young girls ). Her married sister, Frances, has inveigled Cynthia to visit, intent on fostering a reunion with their long-estranged father, now 82 and suffering paralysis from a stroke. Cynthia believes that her father is responsible for her invalid mother's death when Cynthia was only 13, while Frances has a very different take on the past. As the family gathers at the table, tense arguments ensue as bitter feelings and warring memories erupt in ugly fashion, ensuring a memorable holiday experience for all. Berne uses a number of skillful techniques, including an unreliable narrator and the dark connections between Cynthia's books and her personal life, to create a truly horrific atmosphere. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Family dysfunction gets a much-needed makeover in this solid, satisfying novel from Orange Prize winner Berne (A Crime in the Neighborhood). When Cynthia Fiske, a successful author, reluctantly agrees to visit one of her sisters, Frances, for Thanksgiving, the siblings resume their long-running argument over what really happened the night their mother died. Despite their best efforts, this disagreement permeates their conversations, lacing each word with passive-aggressive meaning and adding suspense to daily routines. Readers who like a measured pace will enjoy the tension that builds as Cynthia's visit progresses, while those who appreciate a good metaphor will relish the parallel between Cynthia's latest project-a history of Mark Twain's daughters-and the Fiskes' own trauma. Amusing concrete symbols, e.g., a Jacuzzi-thawed turkey and one of the ugliest family heirlooms to grace the pages of contemporary fiction, add heft to the narrative, making it easy for the reader to see (and choose) sides. An original take on a frequently explored subject; recommended for medium to large fiction collections.-Leigh Anne Vrabel, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
