Book Review/The Ghost at the Table
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Years ago in my naive youth as a police reporter covering the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office beat, a sheriff’s lieutenant told me that law enforcement hates Thanksgiving and Christmas because those two holidays bring out the worst in families. I questioned his cynical cop mentality, but the years I covered a police beat in the giant megalopolis of Los Angeles I came to realize the wisdom of his statement, as sad as it may be.
I don’t know if Suzanne Berne was ever a police reporter, but in "The Ghost at the Table," she surely captured the reason why law enforcement dreads this time of year and its evil consquences. Berne had already proved her crime writing skills with her first book, "A Crime in the Neighborhood." I look for her name to be on many future psychologoical trauma dramas.
This book is about a Thanksgiving family reunion. Cynthia Fiske, the protagonist and narrator of the story is a freelance writer living in San Francisco who writes historical fiction for girls, depicting the lives of remarkable women. Almost every year her older sister, Frances, invites her to come to New England for a visit at Thanksgiving and Christmas but she always manages an excuse to say no.
The reason is that she has a conflict with their father, whom she believes 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 married the much younger Ilse, and packed Frances and Cynthia off to boarding school.
Frances now informs her that their father has suffered a stroke and Ilse is divorcing him and wants him out of the house. Frances leads Cythinia to believe he is confined to a nursing home.
She finally acquiesces to Frances’ plea despite the advice of her close friend who reminds Cynthia that "families are toxic." Cynthia has decided to do some research while on the East Coast by visiting Mark Twain’s home in Hartford.
She is writing a new novel on Twain’s daughters. When she arrives ate Frances’ restored colonial home in Concord, Mass. she discovers her father is not quite settled in the nursing home, in fact Frances wants her help in getting him placed. The reader can almost feel the tension when she and Frances take their father to the nursing home and he is turned away because there is no room.
Frances has to take him to her own home and by the time the assorted guests, including Frances’s complicated teenage daughters, her mysterious husband and the speech-impaired father sit down at Frances’s table, Berne manages to take the reader through all phases of a dysfunctional family as unspoken secrets come to light.
The readers feel like they, too, have been invited to dinner and find themselves right in the middle of family discord. Berne writes such a believable story, which incidentally does have a twisted happy ending, that the readers may think their own family is quite normal by comparison. To me it sounded like another night on the police beat in Los Angeles.
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Opinion Page of The News-Review every Thursday.)