First published 1994. Minerva, paperback, 1994, pp 211, c.70,000 words.
I’m not a fan of ghost stories, but I do love Alison Lurie’s writing, and as this is the only fiction of hers I haven’t read… well it was time.
There are ten unconnected stories in this collection, and they average about twenty pages apiece. Reading it is like dipping into a box of rich chocolates: best to be individually savoured and not rushed right through. While many are set in Lurie’s familiar university town of Corinth, upstate New York (a thinly disguised Ithaca, home to Cornell University, where Lurie taught for many years,) the spread of locations in broad: UK, India, a fictional sub-Saharan African country, and other locations in the USA.
What they have in common are, broadly, good hearted, intelligent, American women at their centres who are unsettled by some type of ‘ghost’ or apparition, haunted object or unnatural happening. These women initially dismiss these events as a minor delusion or miss-seeing. Repeated appearances or occurrences undermine the rational explanations until they become hard to deny. Each story is resolved in some way, usually with the protagonist overcoming the ‘ghost’ and perhaps realising they have benefited in some way from the preceding events; but not all: some end badly.
I didn’t come away from reading this any more in favour of ghost stories. There is always something contrived about them. They are fantasies that the rational mind rejects as being bogus.
This collection in no way undermined my enthusiasm for Lurie’s writing. She is absolutely brilliant for economy of description when evoking people and place, even if they are a fairly narrow selection. All the characters come across as real people in real relationships: knowing and deluded, rational and yet prone to superstition, loving and irritable, warm and prickly.
If you’re a fan of ghost stories and want an introduction to the wonderful writing of Lurie, look no further.
© William John Graham, May 2022