If you’ve braved one too many supposedly spooky novels only to find the pages haunted by nothing but stale genre devices like these, you might approach The Ghost Notebooks with a certain 'been there, read that' trepidation. But luckily, Ben Dolnick’s ambitions go beyond run-of-the-mill thrills and chills ... Dolnick...serves up a more nuanced account of the couple’s unraveling, leaving us to wonder if their problems are the work of malevolent spiritual forces or a complicated psychological meltdown ... Readers won’t come to these pages hoping for a love story. What they want is a well-crafted ghost story, and that’s exactly what they’ll get.
Dolnick excels at creating a subtle, growing sense of unease. His narrative shuttles skillfully between Nick’s point of view, pages from Wright’s work, Hannah’s curatorial observations, the case notes of the psychiatrist who treated Hannah’s depression and a series of fragmentary visions of everyday life, disturbing in their very mundanity. Dolnick also doesn’t shy away from evoking unbearable grief and loss, far more frightening emotions than those encountered in less ambitious supernatural tales ... the greater mystery unveiled in this powerful novel lies not in spooky atmospherics, but our own failure to connect with those closest to us.
The Ghost Notebooks isn’t a particularly frightening story, nor is it filled with 'horror' per se. It may wring a shiver or two from the reader; however, they won’t be frissons of fear but more of poignancy. This novel is one that will leave the reader thoughtful and perhaps linger long in the memory. It’s a haunting story of one man’s determination to assuage his grief by keeping the dead alive and another man’s struggle to give them peace.
He has a gift for metaphor, a way of expressing complex emotions and relationships with a pithy comparison that’s easy to understand but genuinely illuminating, and at the same time isn’t a cliché and never feels cutesy ... Notebooks is Dolnick’s most thematically ambitious work, and while it maintains the clarity and broad sympathy that marks all his writing, it falters a bit as his narrative swings for the cosmos. It’s as though his premise and the ultimate point he wants to make are incompatible ... it’s implied that love can essentially transcend death, a nice idea that’s unconvincing under the circumstances ... Dolnick aims for a tearjerker finale he doesn’t earn ... This is the kind of issue you only really notice after you’ve finished the book, as you reach the 'Oh, that’s it?' final page, but it does make the book’s foundation feel retroactively weaker.
In his previous novels, Dolnick has examined meaningful episodes in his characters’ lives; here, in this compelling mix of love story, detective story, and ghost story, he takes a haunting look at what might follow life.
The constituent pieces of the plot are unconvincingly stitched together ... And for a story ostensibly about hauntedness, there isn’t much of a frightening vibe. Its strength is as a tale about a young man’s grief, capturing the mental blind alleys bereavement sends us down ... though Dolnick is a strong observational writer playing with a variety of forms (memoir loose, 19th-century formal), the prevailing feeling is of a supernatural tale falling short of its ambitions. A ghost story that’s more clunky than creepy.
Nick’s convincing narration, a chronicle of blind spots and good intentions, is chief among the devices Dolnick (At the Bottom of Everything) deploys to give familiar motifs a contemporary sensibility in this ghost tale, love story, mystery, and bildungsroman.
