The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (Shannon Ravenel Books) [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Suzanne Berne (Author)

Book Description

Series: Shannon Ravenel Books | Publication Date: September 22, 2006

Strikingly different since childhood and leading very dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have nevertheless managed to remain "devoted"—so long as they stay on opposite coasts. But with the reappearance of their elderly, long-estranged father they find themselves reunited for a cold, snowy Thanksgiving week—a reunion that awakens sleeping tensions and old sorrows.

Frances envisions a happy family holiday with her husband and daughters in her lovely old New England farmhouse. Cynthia, a writer of historical fiction, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother's death twenty-five years earlier. Adding to her uneasiness is her research for a book on Mark Twain's daughters, whose lives she thinks eerily mirror her own and Frances's.

As Thanksgiving day arrives, with a houseful of guests looking forward to dinner, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of their shared past, until a warning issued by Cynthia's friend Carita, that "families are toxic" and "blood is bloody," proves prophetically true.

The Ghost at the Table reveals what happens when one person tries to rewrite another's history and explores the mystery of why families try to stay together even when it may be in their best interests to stay apart.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This taut psychological drama by Orange Prize–winner Berne (A Crime in the Neighborhood) unfolds as San Francisco freelance writer Cynthia Fiske acquiesces to her maternal older sister, Frances, and attends the Thanksgiving family reunion Frances is hosting at her perfectly restored Colonial home in Concord, Mass. Cynthia believes her father, now 82, murdered their invalid mother with an overdose of pills when Cynthia was 13, and she has no wish to ever see him again. Within months after their mother died, their father packed Frances and Cynthia off to boarding school and married the much younger Ilse, a graduate student who worked as part-time tutor to Frances. But now he's suffered a stroke. Ilse is divorcing him, and the family is placing him in a home. Tension is high by the time the assorted guests, including Frances's complicated teenage daughters, her mysterious husband and the speech-impaired patriarch, are called to Frances's table, and it doesn't take much to fan the first flares of anger into the inevitable conflagration. Berne takes an inherently dramatic conflict—one sister's intention to obfuscate the hard truths of the past vs. another's determination to drag them under a spotlight —and ratchets up the stakes with astute observation and narrative cunning. (Oct. 20)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Sisters, living and dead, loom large in Berne's tale of family secrets unraveled. Cynthia Fiske writes a series of historical fiction for girls, depicting the lives of remarkable women through the eyes of their slightly less-remarkable sisters. An invitation to her own sister's house for Thanksgiving in New England coincides with her need to visit Mark Twain's home in Hartford to research a new novel on the writer's daughters, whose story of a charismatic father and three troubled siblings parallels the Fiskes' history. Complicating the usual holiday tensions is the presence of their elderly father, once brash and manipulative, now disabled and facing a divorce from his much-younger wife. As the family struggles with generations of dysfunction and unspoken secrets, including the mysterious death of their mother decades earlier, Cynthia rebels by sharing the most sordid details of the long-gone Clemens family. Although she is nearing middle age, her feelings of isolation and rejection that began in childhood have left her a perpetual adolescent in relation to her family. Much like the child narrator of Donna Tartt's The Little Friend (Knopf, 2002), Berne portrays a confusing, comic, even sinister family dynamic and eschews a pat, happy ending in favor of a very real, if provocative, choice that will appeal to teen fans of family dramas.—Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book; First Edition edition (September 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565123344
• ISBN-13: 978-1565123342
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,002,009 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY AT THE HOLIDAYS, January 25, 2007

By 

J. Adamcyk "blankczech50" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)

I liked the idea of setting the story in my old haunts. Massachussets, especially the Cape, and West Hartford were well related in text. I especially liked the insights into Mark Twain and his family's secrets. BUT, the parallels with the family in the novel hit you over the head. No subtle references there!However, I expected to have some sort of resolution to who really killed momma. The housekeeper? The dad thought the middle daughter did it. The middle daughter thought the youngest sister did it. The daughter thought the dad did it. I really wanted to like this book.But, it fell short.Depressing as anything.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing and realistic, November 19, 2007

By 

Rushmore (CHICAGO, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (Paperback)

In my opinion this family is not all that dysfunctional. I saw elements of the characters in my own family and my in-laws. When families get together at the holidays there can be tension, closeness, humor, flashes of insight, arguments, resentment. Maybe some individuals will long for their home where all is quiet and familiar. A lot of families have aging parents whose needs must be met. Often parents don't have the best marriage - fathers may be distant or autocratic, moms may be sick a lot, and as they age they kind of fade away. Some family members may want to reach out to others who might otherwise spend the holiday alone - others might bring a guest just to rile things up. There may be a quiet, tortured teenager in the mix. Sisters may fight about what really happened in the past and struggle to control the situation around them. Granted, family heirlooms do not often go up in flames, but with the combination of candles and alcoholic beverages on holidays, it's always a possibility.

I liked this book a lot. I did not feel there was missing information. Yes, there were unanswered questions, just as there are in real life. I think the author's point was that we each have our own version of our history, and we view History with a capital H based on our own frame of reference. I loved the detail about Mark Twain's family life. I don't know whether it was true. There's probably no way to prove it. I'm OK with that. As the author wrote in her note at the end of the book, it all started with her own childhood visit to Twain's homestead, her fantasies about his family life, and a story involving a fictional family that evolved from that experience.

Personally, I found the story riveting. The writing was clean and excellent. The characters were totally realistic. I am going to be thinking about this book for a long time.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memory, Perception and Acceptance, February 26, 2008

By 

K. Ottoson (Colorado USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ghost at the Table: A Novel (Paperback)

Like the memories of real people, the memories of the characters in this book are suspect and flawed. For me, that was what made this book so interesting. The book is told from a single point of view, Cynthia's. For the most part the reader is dealing with her memories and her perceptions, but as the book progresses, those are brought into sharp contrast with the memories of her sister Frances. Frances pretty much sums it up when she says, "That's not what it was like for me."
Childhoods spent in the same house with the same parents are vastly different and it depends so much, as Cynthia concludes, on what a person makes of what he or she is given. By the end of the book, Cynthia takes what she has been given and embraces it with forgiveness and love. The resolution may not be tidy, but it's there; and for me it was very powerful.