WOMAN OF A FAR CASTLE

by Don Dussault ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

In this literary debut, a Western family’s dark past ensnares the lives of two Rhode Island sisters at the dawn of the 20th century.

Clare Farnsworth, part of a famously well-off Newport family, has always been the difficult one. Eleanor, her older sister by six years, submitted to a marriage to a lawyer from a wealthy (if vaguely disreputable) family, but Clare insists on attending art school and quipping about the patriarchy. Needless to say, the two sisters don’t exactly get along. “We littered our sparse conversations with platitudes,” writes Eleanor. “She considered me submerged in a misbegotten marriage and I presumed her preoccupied with esoteric, perhaps debauched, ventures in faraway Providence.” Eleanor’s husband is Marlon Slade, whose family fortune originated with his father, a Navy deserter and gold prospector who supposedly murdered his two partners upon discovering a lode. Eleanor quickly grows suspicious of her husband, who keeps an apartment in New York City while she runs the house in Westchester County. When Marlon suggests that he wants to visit his family in California, Clare—whose interest in the West has been piqued at art school—invites herself along for the journey. Marlon’s father has since died, and the remote Slade house is kept up by the attorney’s brother, the rustic Elbert. Clare quickly realizes that Elbert’s Native American wife, Otekah, has intuited what Eleanor has not: that Clare and Marlon are conducting an affair. When the pair returns to New York, the affair comes to light, and Clare suggests the unthinkable: that she move in with the couple and live as Marlon’s second wife. Eleanor refuses, but when Clare bears Marlon’s child, she is convinced to raise it as her own under the Slade name. The resentment between the two sisters—and the man betwixt them—ebbs and flows for decades, in constant danger of lending validity to an observation that Elbert made about his father when still a boy: “I heared about families all mean killers. Bad seed, folks say.”

Dussault’s novel has an epistolary structure, featuring narratives written by both Clare and Eleanor as well as the uneducated Elbert. Other sections come from books, newspaper articles, and similar documents. As a result, the author is always changing his register, and he proves highly proficient at writing in a number of voices. The tale pays homage to Victorian/Edwardian influences like Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, and it manages to assimilate those periods’ preoccupations with American expansion and mythology. “We think of brave pioneers,” says one of Clare’s professors, speaking of the Gold Rush. “The land was overrun by ignoble bastards bound for wealth or Hell, whichever came first…Some earlybirds got fat. Latecomers tore at each other for the leavings. Gold exposed the cleft in the American soul.” The book has the length and pacing of works from that era and may, therefore, appear a bit mannered or slow to those used to contemporary literature. But at the center is a perennial story of sibling rivalry, family secrets, and the fruits of ruthless ambition centered on an artfully developed cast of characters.

A Victorian/Edwardian pastiche that manages to entertain as much as it impresses.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Manuscript

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION