It's a bad sign, indeed, when a familiar and particularly damning bit of British slang pops into my head as I am reading a novel--the unfortunate word is "twee." The word can be merely descriptive (too cute, kitschy) or it can be part of a judgment. In this case, it is both.
Fans of The Time Traveler's Wife will be eager to read Audrey Niffenegger's second novel and nothing I write should discourage them from that. There are undeniable pleasures in Her Fearful Symmetry--there is a strong sense of local color, and that locality is a particularly appealing part of London. There are several eccentric characters who are at least fun to get to know--at first. And for anyone who really likes ghost stories, there is a ghost story, even including whole sections located in the mind of the main ghost, so we are seeing the world with a ghost's eye view during several important parts of the narrative.
Ms. Niffenegger is also skillful at shifting points of view and perspective, building a degree of suspense as she does so. But she builds that very slowly, indeed. I enjoy the kind of "classic" narrative that builds slowly, gradually dealing out the details of the characters' lives and revealing by steps the important information that advances the plot. But there can be too much of that, and I have to say that well over half of this novel passes slowly by before much of the potential suspense and interest begins to take hold; in the final quarter of the novel, the potential intensity of the story grabs the reader who has been extremely patient until that point.
The main characters of Her Fearful Symmetry are two sets of twins, mother/aunt and the daughters/nieces of the mother twin. At the beginning of the novel, one of the elder twins dies, leaving her estate to the younger twins, who are required to move from Chicago to London to live in the flat which is part of the substantial bequest. That sets in motion the ghost story. The younger twins are reminiscent of the "innocent abroad" American women so prominent in the fiction of Henry James or, more recently, Diane Johnson. Both James and Johnson, however, develop those characters in the context of richly portrayed and complex social contexts; in this case, the isolation of the twins is a necessary part of the ghost story, so there is very little social context to enliven the narrative. The other major characters are two men, both very eccentric in a variety of ways, one of whom lives in the flat above the twins, the other, who was the dead older twin's lover when she died, lives in the flat below.
Much of the opening half of the novel portrays characters not meeting each other, not communicating with each other (though italic sentences frequently let the reader in on what they are thinking), and not doing much of anything except more or less spying on each other. All this is tied to the strong theme of the novel, the difficulty of "knowing" another person, and that is tied, of course, to the even more powerful and challenging theme, the difficulty of knowing oneself. The latter is particularly problematic, we are let to understand, for identical twins who grow up together, frequently mistaken for each other and hardly knowing how to separate themselves from each other. This does go on and on, and the novel seems to be suggesting to us that it is really very important for such division and assertion of individual identity to take place--or dreadful things may happen.
The "twee" quality comes from some of the cutesy observations and behavior both of the younger twins and of the ghost. (Along with the echoes of James and Wharton and Johnson, as well as other twin stories, I could not help but remember Dorothy Baker's much more powerful novel about twins, Cassandra at the Wedding.) There is a potentially interesting effort to make colors--of clothing, of furniture, of faces and bodies--carry some symbolic weight; the potential divisions between both sets of twins are materialized in their very different senses of style in clothing and decoration, but this finally adds little to the narrative, feeling sometimes laid on.
Unlike The Time Traveler's Wife, which had the constant enlivening energy of its tricky premise as a time-travel story, this novel feels loaded down by its immature and eccentric characters, who are finally not interesting enough in themselves to keep the reader engaged until the real ghost story, with its horrific twists, kicks in. Even in that section of the novel, there is entirely too much moping about among the characters; the one redemptive development and a related possibility are at least appealing, but feel disconnected from the main line of the novel.
Though this is not Niffenegger's second book, it is her second--sophomore--novel. Unfortunately, it suffers from sophomoritis. Fans will enjoy it. Others might want to wait fo the author's next novel.
