Where talk sparkles but story stumbles

The cover of Alice Sees Ghosts is misleading — it displays the enticing information that author Daisy Rockwell is a recipient of the International Booker Prize — a confusing proposition, considering Alice Sees Ghosts reads like an airport novel, albeit an eccentric one with luminous details and undeniably excellent dialogue.

In fact, Rockwell, an American, won the prize for her translation of the 2022 International Booker winner, Tomb of Sand, by Hindi-language writer Geetanjali Shree. It appears that being an award-winning translator is not an automatic qualification for being an author of the same calibre.  The premise of the story is as follows: while staying in the beloved Massachusetts home of her dying grandmother, Nanette, Alice begins to see the ghost of her long-dead grandfather. He sets Alice the task of ensuring that certain wrongs are righted following the reading of Nanette’s will. Alice is accompanied on this undertaking by her handsome and long-suffering Indian fiancé, Ronit, who was formerly her psychiatrist during a period when she refused to speak. Spoiler alert — at one point, they end up in India.

The opening line shows promise for an intriguing read: “Nowadays, when Alice spoke, she often noted confusion on the faces of her interlocutors. I must still be speaking written language, she thought, but was not terribly concerned.” This is just the first of many delightfully specific and idiosyncratic details, such as: Ronit’s incongruous obsession with ice skating; Alice’s alcoholic mother rereading the complete works of Anthony Trollope while drunk on a chaise longue; Alice unpatriotically closing her eyes as she drives through toll plazas draped in USA flags.

It’s quirky in a way that could be grating, yet succeeds by being grounded in crisp prose and a matter-of-fact narrative voice.

However, as the book progresses, although the eccentric flourishes continue thick and fast, somewhere around chapter five, the initial gloss fades; one can sense the author behind the scenes hastening her characters through a thin and linear narrative, spoon-feeding plot points with little finesse.

The sentences no longer feel pleasingly sparse, but instead stiff and predictable. Rockwell favours a declarative structure with the subject coming first in a sentence, but one wishes she would take the scenic route occasionally. The chapters end abruptly, sometimes in a strained attempt at gravitas or a cliffhanger, and at other times seemingly arbitrarily.

Rockwell also tends to zoom the audience in and out of the action erratically, sometimes tightly focused on a blow-by-blow account of the sipping of tea or the brushing of crumbs from clothes, sometimes skimming over scenes at breakneck pace. This has a distancing effect whereby it seems that nothing really matters; neither the crumbs nor the quest are of consequence.

It also leads to potentially interesting details being glossed over. For example, Ronit “expresses appropriate sympathy” to Nanette’s nurse about the challenges she has faced as a single mother. We are left wondering what he said — and whether it was, in fact, appropriate. This lazy writing is surprising, because if there’s one thing Rockwell excels at, it’s dialogue, which is razor sharp and does a lot of the ‘showing’ in a book where the ‘telling’ is otherwise prevalent. “Do you think he’d be less helpful if he thought I was crazy?” asks the chronically naive Alice before a visit to her lawyer. Rockwell has a knack for building complicated and convincing characters. Alice is at turns strong-willed and flaky, eccentric and muted, in a way that manages to feel cohesive. 

Clare, Alice’s alcoholic mother, is a multifaceted and realistic portrait of a woman suffering from borderline personality disorder, although this is never made explicit. A fast-paced train-wreck of a scene featuring Clare at Christmas dinner is a highlight of the book, correctly paced and rivetingly awful.  Unfortunately, quirky details and witty dialogues can’t save a book from a plodding narrative voice that tends to undermine its many strengths. It is rare to encounter such contradictions within a book, and the combination can make for a frustrating read. However, if you are a reader more interested in plot and description than the finer mechanics of fiction, and think you’d enjoy an offbeat ‘airport novel’,  maybe this is a book for you.