Customer Reviews

More Than You Know: A Novel

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Having read all of Beth Gutcheon's books, I wasn't prepared for the personal impact of her latest novel, MORE THAN YOU KNOW. This book has been on my shelf for quite some time, waiting for me to delve into it. I never should have waited so long. Hannah, elderly now, tells us about a summer long ago when she was just a girl and fell in love with Conary Crocker. It was the summer her stepmother rented the old schoolhouse in Dundee, Maine, the schoolhouse which had been on the island where a murder had taken place 50 years before. Artfully woven into a tapestry of intrigue, the stories become one as the tales unfold. Although I am a constant reader, I seldom stay up past my bedtime to read, but this book was the exception. Ms. Gutcheon has not only changed her style from previous novels, she has proven herself to be a master story teller. I've always enjoyed her work, but this was the first time I finished one of her books, closed it carefully, and sat quietly to contemplate what I'd read.

Hannah Gray, an elderly woman, returns to the house she summered in as a young woman and decides to tell us the story of the summer she spent falling in love and being terrorized by a ghost. Her story is separated by the story of a family who lived on the island across from Hannah's old summer house over 100 years prior to that fatefull summer. The love story is intense and unforgettable, the ghost story is scary as hell (the scene with the ghost in the rocking chair kept me awake the night after I read it!), and the connection between Hannah's ghost and the old island family that slowly emerges as the stories progress will totally surprise you. I could not put this down once I picked it up. It's FANTASTIC.

I have just finished this book and have to congragulate the author Beth Gutcheon. A longtime reader of this author, I found More Than You Know totally different from her other books and applaud her ability to change both tone and style of this title. Paralleling two tragic stories, Ms.Guthecon allows her readers to glimpse life in small town Maine almost 100 years apart with an equally paralleling story. The reader not only comes to know the characters well but also the landscape of the island and town. The story, while sad, has wondrous moments of first love and devotion. Finally, I found the book fairly reminiscent of The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, another very compelling and different read.

Beth Gutcheon's latest book is wonderfully insightful and delightful to read. Her descriptions of Hannah's childhood, of Claris's first romance are full of detail that rings true to my own experience. Her description of a small town on the Maine coast also rings true - as if you could visit Dundee this summer and be right at home there. The story is fast-moving, a real page-turner. I had to put it down deliberately so that it wouldn't be over too soon. I have read all of Ms. Gutcheon's books and enjoyed every one, but this one may be my favorite.

Gutcheon's latest novel is a departure from her previous "women's books" The New Girls and Five Fortunes, although More Than You Know is just as masterfully written.

Chapters alternate from narrator Hannah Ober's recalling from the perspective of old age her own tragic first love to the ghost's own story of a century before, but until the book's end, the reader is kept guessing at the ghost's identity. However, what might have been simply a ghost story with a romantic element transcends that genre to delve into why some relationships simply cannot succeed no matter how much we may wish they would.

Anyone who has never forgotten that totally unsuitable first love will find this sparely but powerfully written novel entrancing.

Gutcheon's story has all the elements of an engrossing leisure-time read: a believable ghost, mystery, suspense, and a dash of romance. Readers get a vivid glimpse into Maine's coastal and island communities, in the days before they became tourist attractions. The flawed characters are appealing; the pacing makes it easy to go back and forth between the two time periods which the story covers; and the ending is satisfying in a "real life" kind of way. I'm recommending it to my friends.

I am not sure that I really enjoyed this story. I found it enormously powerful, and at times quite frightening. It starts with the narration of Hannah as an old woman in her eighties but is actually two stories -

It is the dual stories of Hannah who has been moved to a small town in Maine by her father. She is living with her rather mean stepmother, and her brother - it is during the depression. And it is also the story of Claris Haskell, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, and of her terrible choice in marriage and the slow unfolding of consequences.

Gutcheon uses the two stories in parallel - the one of young hannah and love slowly unfolding, and that of Claris, and the story of her love slowly and chillingly being stifled and turned into hatred.

In Hannah's life there is a malevolent ghost - something haunting the house they are living with - something that breaks things, and when she sees it, finally, it is the figure of an old woman crawling on the floor with burning eyes.

From its appearance Hannah wants to find out why it is there, and discovers the murder nearly a century before of Danial Haskell, possibly by his daughter Sallie, Claris's daughter.

I really liked Gutcheon's writing, I thought it was simple and spare but enormously powerful. The story was so tragic though. Everytime Claris tried to break through the barriers she was thwarted by the meanness of her husband and the bitterness grew. I found it overwhelmingly sad at times.

And with Hannah in the present, the haunting of this malevolence in both the spirit world and from her stepmother I again found a bit too overwhelming. There was the love story with Conaray which should have been enough, but I felt there was an inevitable doom about it all. It was just all a bit too sad for me.

More Than You Know is told retrospectively by an old woman as she tells the tale of a summer during her teenage years when she lived on the coast of Maine with her stern and dour stepmother. Hannah, the teenager, sees ghosts in their house, which used to be on an island but was moved to the mainland. When the learns that a man was killed there ¾ of a century ago and his daughter acquitted of the murder, the plot thickens.
Then there's the other story, the story from the 1800s of that lonely daughter who married a quiet, uncommunicative man and moved to the island.
The two stories and their parallel tragedies interweave in a stunning book.
As a writer, what I found particularly admirable was the way the author moved from distant past (200 yrs ago) to more recent past (50 yrs ago) so seamlessly, often with nothing more than a paragraph break. It's not an easy stunt to pull off without jarring your readers; most authors choose a chapter break to leap 150 yrs back and forth.
But it worked, as does the whole book about love, loss, and death, past and present.

You don't just pick this book up and get what you might expect from a typical ghost story, or a love story, or a history lesson. You pick this book up, in the right frame of mind, and settle down for a tale...like the Tale of Sleepy Hollow...or the Turn of the Screw, or The Haunting of Hill House.

There is an eerie mood to this book but not so much that you cannot empathathize with the narrator, who, when we meet her, is so old she knows that if she doesn't tell her story now, it will be lost forever.

Most of the time, in the book, she is her young, wild self, madly in love with the local bad boy, back in the twenties, in a difficult summer in her life. The starkly depicted yet beautiful coast of Maine is the perfect setting for their affair of the heart and soul. One second you are becalmed, one second you are crashed against the rocks.

Years earlier, another affair began and ended in murder and tragedy. These two love stories are entwined. Our present narrator, Hannah, learns all she can of the awful town tragedy that is still recalled by some, but was never solved to anyone's satisfaction.

Yes, I got the chills when the ghost appeared; perhaps you need to want to believe? For fun? To think that there may be something more? Who knows? I also felt the passion and the happiness that Hannah had with her "bad boy", Conary. Descriptions of the "clamming day" and the day they took the Packard were full of depth.

Were there things lacking in this novel, as so many reviewers have felt? I really liked it, so I don't think so. You read into it what you want to read. The ending must be left up in the air, for the reader to come to conclusions by thinking backwards, the way the book moves backwards, through time...

This book was entertaining enough and since it did keep me interested, I gave it a medium rating. The book is well written and the double plot device used by the author is clever. However, what kept me riveted to the book was Claris' story and not Hannah's. Half the book is a romantic treatise of the great love between Hannah and Conary - quite boring. There are three chapters dedicated to the clamming episode which could have been shortened. Hannah's story was not so much a ghost story as a love story and I was bored during most of the sections dedicated to her. I bought the book to read about ghosts, not romance. Additionally, I wearied of the detailed descriptions of Maine and sailing. The ending was predictable and, as many other reviewers noted, it was easily figured out in the first 50 pages. This is not a suspenseful novel at all. However, the section concerning the Haskells were well-written and kept my interest. I just wish that Ms. Gutcheon would have focused on this family instead of the sappy love story.