Howard Norman writes elegant prose—but really, that's because everything about Howard Norman is elegant ... Many a domestic-thriller writer would have taken this fabulous conceit and used it in constructing an unbearably taut tale of psychological angst. But Norman is after different game—not better, necessarily, just different. The Ghost Clause has myriad elements that could spark mystery, investigation, or terror ... Simon is a far from perfect spouse, novelist, or narrator, but he hasn't given up on life's goodness and pleasures. As he guides you through a season in Adamant, you may find yourself dreaming about taking a sabbatical up north.
Certainly these elements—erotic, comic, oddball, even genuinely unsettling—are more than seductive. If only The Ghost Clause built on them to deliver what it at first seems to promise: a spooky and heartfelt tale of love and loss, of two marriages linked by the bones of an old house. Instead, bafflingly, Norman decides to throw a lot of other, less engaging, plotlines into the mix ... the central relationships barely change; the farmhouse itself is dropped for pages on end; so many threads that ought to be satisfyingly woven together seem to miss their connections. And the tangents don’t help ... It’s a pity, because Norman’s evocation of that emotionally and temporally elastic space between life and death, the 'ongoingness,' is hypnotic. I’d have liked fewer wacky diversions and more of the shivery, disruptive unease that worked so well in the opening chapter and almost brought me to tears in Norman’s haunting final paragraph.
...the whodunit plot operates at a simmer ... Norman is striving to change our concept of the afterlife—not as something that is the opposite of living, but its palimpsest, its echo. Death delivers us not to heaven or hell but to the library. And aren’t books, like ghosts, echoes of our lives? In tweaking our conception of the afterlife, Norman is abandoning the ghost story as we’ve been conditioned to understand it ... The melancholic mood thickens in The Ghost Clause, as Simon, Lorca, Zachary, and Muriel contemplate their losses (the missing child, the miscarriage, Simon himself). Yet the novel’s trajectory also ultimately stabilizes the mood, as Corrine’s case is resolved and the nature of Simon’s presence becomes clearer. This isn’t the same thing as saying the novel has a happy ending...it simply acknowledges the push and pull of joy and loss.
...[a] rambling, at times beautiful, at times annoyingly precious novel ... Norman’s observations of life’s joys—as voiced by Simon—are often beautifully specific, intimate, and detailed ... This is lovely writing. However, when the descriptions begin to pile up, they lose their impact, becoming as bloodless as that ghost ... Although Simon’s close observations are interrupted by small attempts at humor—that cat—and lots of implied, life-affirming sex, they are too often as mawkish and didactic as advice from any well-meaning elder. This tendency is emphasized by Norman’s infatuation with certain words—like 'ongoingness' and 'crepuscular'—which recur a bit too often ... When Muriel quotes Faulkner—'the past isn’t even past'—her husband notes, 'That’s all a little too literary.' Perhaps not to the newly minted academic or to Simon, her spectral predecessor in the house. Norman however, should have listened to his own characters and rooted them a bit more forcefully in the present.
A paean to married love, creative endeavors, and compassion, and a delving look at love, loss, memory, and the afterlife in accord with Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Goodbye, Norman’s atmospheric, wise, and witty novel has the radiance, hiss, and snap of a hearth fire on a wintry night.
... a heart-wrenching story of endings and grief, but also of new beginnings ... sad but not overly so, and sometimes even heartwarming in the way that life can be in times of great sadness. It’s creepy, though not exactly how you’d expect. But then again, not all ghost stories must be scary to be effective ... While there are a few things I might quibble with, overall The Ghost Clause is a homey book that I didn’t want to put down. It lures you in, making you feel comfortable and safe. Then enters a ghost. I adored the characters and loved that an old farmhouse captivated me with its history and stories. Norman provides an excellent excuse to read the day away.
...a charming, meticulously crafted, laid-back ghost story ... The book...is more often drolly humorous than not, remote from horror’s more extreme boundaries. Still, there is melancholy and poignance aplenty. But aside from its inherent virtues, it offers some instructive lessons about the apparent differences between mainstream and genre ghost stories. Norman deftly weaves backstory and real time events in an alluring tapestry ... Despite being narrated by a ghost, the book is ninety percent concerned with quotidian affairs. In fact, at some points I began to wonder if the tale could have been told equally effectively without Simon being there at all. But the resonant supernatural ending scotched that surmise, and in fact Simon’s presence does impinge significantly ... Norman’s main characters are all from a certain well-bred stratum of society and deal with each other with a punctilio and correctness that sometimes approaches blandness ... The Ghost Clause is a benign haunting that leaves readers and participating parties happier for its happening.
Howard Norman’s new novel The Ghost Clause is a ghost story, a crime drama, an academic story, a marital study, and a portrait of small-town life, and yet it’s as compact and almost quiet a thing as all the author’s other novels, as effective a combination of powerful human understanding and four-square storytelling as, for instance, The Northern Lights or The Bird Artist ... The novel has some fine, nuanced examinations of married life, although one of Pell’s choices at the end of the book will strike pretty much any grieving person as flat-out unbelievable. The Ghost Clause is smart and no-nonsense; it’s not fussy, and it sets about telling its multiple stories with a clean workmanship that feels both old-fashioned and a bit revolutionary. We come to care about its half-dozen main characters, flaws and all, and the passage of time in the book feels natural. The familiar claim that all old Vermont houses are haunted a moving and very real-world memorial here.
This isn’t a plot so much as a kind of atmosphere ... Yet, like the poet Muriel studies, who tucks erotic parentheticals into her mordant poems, a little light slips into the story, resolving both the case of the missing girl and Simon’s uneasy sense of place. What opens as a ghost story turns out to be something of a love story instead. Familiar turf for Norman’s longtime readers, but he still has a knack for finding emotional resonances in muted, unlikely scenarios.
Norman...poignantly examines the trajectory of two marriages from the viewpoint of a dead writer ... Throughout, Simon infuses sharp observations with insightful ruminations about the joys of living, which are particularly heartrending coming from one who can no longer experience them. This is an astute, beautifully written novel.
