Description:
In Vermont a dowser detects a strongbox filled with diaries and letters, a cache that suggests that expatriate 19th-century novelist O. had a decades-long romance with American Lucinda Dearborn. These documents share some eerie parallels with the lives of the present owners of Thrush Hollow, the crumbling Vermont hotel Lucinda once ran. Ned and Greta Dene are experiencing subliminal marital difficulties. Greta's longtime lover, Crain, whom she believes to be the father of her son, Henry, has just died in a plane crash. Ned first met Greta in France when she was 16 and suffering from stigmata that erupted soon after a young Crain returned to Mexico to wed Julia. By the novel's end, Greta invites the widow Julia and her children to visit Thrush Hollow. The secrets Julia confides in Greta upend her world and her stigmata return. Ned, a historian by trade, recognizes the scholarly importance (and the tabloid potential) of the O. and Lucinda documents, but is reluctant to disclose their existence to the world at large. Kathryn Kramer confides to her readers what Lucinda did not record in her diaries--despite her intellectual devotion to O., she had a longstanding, zestily consummated affair with a local harness-maker, Zebulon Snow. It is only after Lucinda drowns herself, following O.'s death abroad, that Zeb discovers their union produced a stillborn child. If all of this sounds fantastically complicated, well, it is. Secret upon secret unfurls as Kramer's Jamesian sentences meander toward the final period: She had thought of how, once, the sea had covered the land, how its hollows and slopes had felt the sea's penetration and caress; no emptiness had been left unfilled, so that, ever since the water had receded, the brooks and rivers travelling to the sea had molded the hills with their longing to return, and everywhere the character of the land had been shaped by this striving: to go back, sweet water joining to salt, back to where neither knew where one stopped and the other began. In this, her third novel, Kramer requires patience of her readers and rewards it with the byzantine intricacies of her fictional edifice. --Joyce Thompson
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