The Guest House
By Sarah Blake. New York: Flatiron Books, 2019. 484 pages.
It began with a distinctive landscape, the island in Maine that Sarah Blake’s grandparents fell in love with and bought immediately on impulse during the Great Depression. From that familiar family ground, Blake conjured an entirely different family to inhabit the place with their own complex history.
Most families keep their secrets close, and the Miltons of Crockett’s Island are no exception. The novel is saturated with the longing we feel to go back past our beginnings and experience family history firsthand. Although the main character, Evie Milton, is a historian, she is deep in the dark about her own family. She doesn’t realize her mother has epilepsy until she finds the medication after her mother dies. Threatened by the sale and permanent loss of her family’s island, she finally deploys her historian’s skills to learn what the walls and waters whisper and the family doesn’t say.
Like the rest of us, Evie never learns everything and will never know what eludes her. We pick up some clues with her as she goes, but the author takes readers on a wider tack to the same place in a satisfying mystery plot.The omniscient point of view is used to revive earlier generations, to crack open their closets and call out the ghosts, skeletons, and forgotten visitors.
The story shows and tells us that ultimately “we vanish.” Some watch as others disappear, and some look away. Sometimes, we know the where and when but not the why. The historical record helps Evie to reconstruct her family’s past, but she learns that some people have a profound effect on others without ever leaving their mark in the book. As the great historical novelist Hilary Mantel says, “Beneath every history, another history.” The snug harbor of the Milton family island conceals treacherous currents of racism and nazi sympathy.
If you enjoy your histories artfully layered; if you love traveling back and forth in time to search for clues; if you would like to slip uninvited into a summer weekend house party to explore the shadows beyond the shimmering surface; this book was written for you.
