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Rebecca Goldstein

The Dark Sister Hardcover – July 1, 1991

by Rebecca Goldstein (Author)

6 customer reviews

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When an eccentric writer moves from New York City to New England to concentrate on writing a novel in the style of Henry James, the drama she plays out with her younger narcissistic sister mirrors the drama unfolding in her work

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Goldstein ( The Mind-Body Problem ; The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind ) has cleverly constructed a highly imaginative tale that commands close analysis. Hedda, a grotesque, tormented author of angry feminist novels, has exiled herself to a gloomy New England house, where her grim solitude is interrupted only by phone calls from her silly but dangerous sister, Stella. Hedda is writing a Victorian novel, in Henry Jamesian style, about Henry's brother William, the 19th-century psychologist. In the work, William is sent to study two sisters--one a brilliant recluse, the other possibly murderous--with pasts as murky as Hedda's. Characters are mirrored, parallel plots overlap and several dark sisters--gifted with imaginative intellects but viewed as morbidly deviant--are doomed to destruction. Although this book may at times seem an unstructured melange of repeated themes, images and phrases inspired by 19th-century literature, psychology, metaphysics and feminist history, its disjointedness is purposeful and provocative. Readers who persevere will be rewarded by this witty, literary tour de force.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A novel within a novel, this story of psychic misunderstandings and demonic possession occurs in two different centuries to two different characters. Hedda, an eccentric feminist author and creator of AJW (angry Jewish women) heroines, is blocked in her attempt to write a novel about an incident in the life of 19th-century New England psychologist William James. Finally, she allows the novel to write itself in the style of William's famed brother Henry. William fails to understand both his neurasthenic sister and his latest client, who fears her sister is possessed by the spirit of an astronomer. As the bizarre tale reaches its tragic climax, Hedda herself verges on mental collapse. Although knowledge of the life and works of Henry James would enhance the reader's enjoyment of this clever novel, this book can be savored on its own for its excellent characterization, wit, and compelling plot. Recommended.
- Judith F. Bradley, Acad. of Holy Cross Lib., Kensington, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (July 1, 1991)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670835560
ISBN-13: 978-0670835560
Product Dimensions: 20 x 20 x 20 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Average Customer Review: 6 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,128,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #227105 in American Literature (Books)
- #128625 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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A RochesterTop Contributor: Cooking

Hard to keep story straight.

June 1, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

The Dark Sister was a book I bought, started and quit because I did not like it. Fast forward and there is an evening when I have nothing to read. So once again I read The Dark Sister and finish it. I did not like it. Goldstein writes ok but the story is confusing. Two beautiful sisters grow up and both are writers. So we are reading their books plus the story of their life. Although both girls were beautiful children neither has retained that beauty. Hedda,has a medical condition, and as a result she has grown into a monster, tall thin, course features. The story has unstable people, seances, communicating with the dead. It was not my kind of book.

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Meshuggenneh

June 1, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The above title to this review is Yiddish for mad, insane. I did not know this word before reading the novel within a novel that constitutes this novel. I did not know many words that I now know in the following languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, French, German, and, mirabile dictu, Polish. But the word accurately describes both the form and ultimate effect of the novel that consists of one "dark sister," Hedda, writing a novel about the Jameses (William and Henry) and another dark sister. Actually dark sisters abound as do, of necessity, dark daughters - "mia figlia scura" as one father addresses his progeny. Need I say that if the reader can't be bothered to look into all these matters, he/she might as well not bother with the book? It is full of - Goldstein's word - cerebrations in a potpourri of languages and situations that bedazzle. But the novel is essentially, to quote from it, one of those compositions that "arouse a response almost too stingingly poignant within those whose inmost souls are - even in a life crowded full of family and friends, students and colleagues - dyed in the tones of solitude."

"All fiction is autobiographical!" says one character herein. And the effect of all this metafictional, mind-turning hopscotch stylistics in the book was but to cast the focus ever more intensely on Goldstein. There is no sense, in a sense, to be made of this work. It very much reminded me of Iris Murdoch (another Philosophy professor) in certain parts. But Murdoch's sapience quickly degenerates into moralisms whereas Goldstein's keeps spinning into the deep, dark miasma of the universe and soul, and, important this, she pulls it off!

The book has a dark, swampy undertow permeating it. That's as close as I can come, or desire to come, to describing it. One might as well try to "define" this Emily Dickinson quote in the book:

"Ourself behind ourself, concealed
Should startle most -
Assassin hid in our apartment-
Be horror's least-"

As Hedda/Goldstein puts it:

"How can we think eternally to maintain ourselves when personal identity is, even while we live, a plumped-up phantom, a frightened fiction by which the vast majority of us try to keep the wider sea from breaking through?
But it shall break through. Sooner or later, for us all, it shall batten us down and break us through."

I tried to think of a reason to give this book only four stars, but, after much reflection, the only valid one was that I wanted it to continue swirling and gyring through my mind. I wanted more of it!

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Paul Frandano

Provocative, Pedantic, Pleasurable

June 17, 2017

Format: Paperback

Enjoyed this cerebral mash-up of meta-writing, philosophy, psychology, ghost-(or is it "spirit")-yarn/mystery, and send-up provocation that Goldstein cleverly double-plots through the intertwined stories of two sets of sisters, one fair, one dark, Hedda and Stella, of the contemprorary world (and thus the controlling narrative voice, via author/narrator Hedda), and Alice and Vivianna, of the early 20th century, living in a large, brooding, tower-dominated house in the hills of northwestern Connecticut, and with whom the psychologist-philosopher William James becomes involved. Through the personage of James's thus arrives the central conceit of the narrative: Henry-Jamesian prose. Goldstein is smitten with the literature of the 19th century and writes Hedda as equally smitten. Moreover, here, in Hedda's novel-in-progress, eponymously entitled The Dark Sister, she (or both...as in both author and character...there's more than a bit of self-referential meta- here) is a bit of a magpie, pinching words, phrases, and diction from Henry and the occasional collateral Victorian contemporary. (Goldstein prefaces her story by acknowledging the authors and titles of which she is confident Hedda is aware, and a brief prologue of James-family sketches and quotations.)

I docked the novel a star - actually, a half-star - for MacArthur-Fellow Goldstein's too, too ostensible pedantry, her show-offy delight in obscure words - words down in the lowest usage-frequency percentiles - and references, and her sometimes plodding, text-booky style. (I had to look up sthenic, borborygmus, lanuginous, and six or seven other Greek or Latinate terms that stumped me...you know when your tummy gurgles - what Mommy used to say was "your stomach talking to you"? Gastroenterologists know this as "borborygmus" - accent on the third syllable, "ryg"). A reviewer might easily have written all this off as satirical - Hedda, the primary voice, is sensitive about never having gone to college, and she has a habit of jotting mental nota benes when she encounters words she MUST find occasion to use, words like "ossuous" and "embrocate." But I elected to choose pedanticism over satirical intent and what struck me as William James's more technical phrasing over Henry James's dreamier lapidary prose. The novel is broken up into 17 mostly short chapters, a few of which are fairly sprightly but the majority of which tend at some point to slog in an over-expository way.

Even so, Goldstein is a close observer and careful depicter of humans and landscapes and all manner of organic matter. She sees into, and through, things. She has a philosopher's care for language as the vehicle of transmitted comprehension. She drops a handful of witty bons mots. And she made me want to return to Henry James and to read Alice James's diary and letters as well as Charlotte Bronte's Villette, and to finally take down from the shelf Ingrid Rowland's biography of Giordano Bruno that's been glaring down at me for nearly a decade.

That's not bad from a novel that won't be for every taste but will suit a variety of tastes, like mine.

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