Set largely in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and following a protagonist through some formative years, The Paper Palace is far from an idyllic coming-of-age tale. The title is the affectionate nickname for a beat-up old house in the Cape woods, where the various branches of the family return over and over again.
The novel consists of two parallel time threads: one in the present, over the course of a single day, and an intermingled backstory that covers several decades. This is an approach that becomes clear after a few chapters, and maintains the interest level.
For clarity, each chapter is titled appropriately
Today, August 1, the Back Woods
or
1966, December, New York City.
The 1966 chapter starts when Elle (Eleanor), the protagonist of the novel, is a mere 3 months old, and ‘today’ is when she is fifty, married to Peter, with 3 children. ‘Today’ is also the day after she had passionate sex with Jonas, her best friend who has had an unrequited passion for her since he was eight (!).
What led to the separation between Elle and Jonas? That is a fundamental part of the book, but there’s much more to it, thank goodness. It is nice to see a protagonist who is fifty, and desired by two very handsome men, but doomed romances can only hold my attention for so long. The backstory, though, starts with baby Elle having surgery for a tumor:
While the doctor is inside me, he cuts off an ovary, careless, rushing to carve the death out of life.
This is an omen for the rest of the book, where death is ever-present. When Elle is seven, a hamster is suffocated and a mouse is fed to a pet snake while Elle and her sister Anna watch. At thirteen, Elle is taken to her mother’s boyfriend’s friend’s house, where a strange young man kills a deer in front of her, in a quite creepy scene. An unknown child dies on Cape Cod when seashore dunes collapse. A man drowns in a pool when twenty-something-year-old Elle is nearby, in London. A major character dies of cancer. And, central to the novel, a teenager drowns in a sailing accident.
Also ever-present is sex. Elle’s parents divorced when she was young, and after that her parents went through a fairly bewildering set of boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives. Step-siblings appear and disappear. Adults casually discuss their sex lives in front of the children. Elle overhears her mother begging her boyfriend for sex ‘Please, Leo, it’s been so long’. As a child, she is supervised by friends of her mother’s who emerge from afternoon sex completely naked. Elle and Anna watch a couple make love on the beach.
There was something obscene about it. Not the sex, which frightened and fascinated me, but the way her body squished out on the hard ground like uncooked dough, and the way she didn’t seem to care if we saw them.
Far grimmer is the incestual abuse. Elle’s mother was abused by her stepfather, and she refers to the abuse quite casually. Sexual abuse is the secret hidden behind one of the deaths, and is described in fairly graphic terms. This makes for difficult reading.
The descriptions are picturesque and vivid, especially for the scenes set in Cape Cod.
The road to Black Pond is almost invisible, the center strip overgrown with wild grasses so high that as we drive, they brush the underbelly of our car, a sound like wind across a prairie. […] Black Pond is the smallest kettle pond in the woods — a place only “Woods People” know about. This pond is older, wiser, wizened, as if it holds too many secrets. A bottomless watering hole surrounded by dense forest, that lives half of its day in shadow.
There is excellent detailing, down to the childhood plans of Elle to run away with Anna:
We’d collect cranberries and blueberries so we wouldn’t get scurvy. I started to make a list in my head of the supplies we’d need. […] But it’s almost Labor Day now, and the only survival supplies I have managed to collect are two rusty coffee cans, an old pair of pliers, and a few candle stubs.
Heller does well with her characters and dialogue. For example, a ‘perfect’ character is rarely interesting in fiction, and Peter, Elle’s English husband, is quite perfect. He is tall, handsome, good-natured, funny, tolerant, understanding, sensitive, calm, supportive, and physically and mentally tough when required. And yet the author manages to make him interesting, and not just a Mills-and-Boon caricature. Part of it comes from the distinctive little descriptions,
‘What’s wrong with socks and sandals?’ Peter gets out and starts unloading gear from the trunk. ‘It’s the Englishman’s uniform abroad’.
and from his lowkey, pleasant banter:
‘Elle, I think your mother may have incipient dementia.’
‘Your husband is intolerable.’ [Elle’s mother] laughs. ‘It might be time to think about a divorce.’
‘Your grandmother has always been a great wit,’ Peter says.
The strength of the novel also comes from the way the incidents are linked together, all shown, not told. A swim today, when Elle is torn between Peter and Jonas, recalls a swim twenty years ago when she first met Jonas following a snapping turtle. A ring appears and reappears, with significance that is left to the reader to deduce.
Despite her difficult childhood, Elle is resilient, but the author makes it clear how the abuse has affected the choices and decisions of her entire messy and complicated life.
That said, despite the strong writing, it is difficult to recommend this book simply because of the relentlessly grim situations. Perhaps it is for stronger stomachs than mine.
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