A Sudden Light

When someone commits a transgression against nature, their descendants will suffer its consequences until their debt is repaid. That is one of a handful of driving concepts behind "A Sudden Light" by Garth Stein, the author's first novel since his immensely successful 2008 New York Times Best Seller. It pits the habitual sins of tradition against the future's potential for change as an obvious metaphor for LGBTQ rights in the form of the destiny of the descendants of a late nineteenth century timber company to return their family's estate to the earth.

"A Sudden Light" tells the story of Trevor Riddell, a fourteen-year-old boy who visits Riddell House, his father's childhood home and a very literal manifestation of his forefathers' success, in an attempt to fix their lives. Only he finds it teeming with restless ghosts like Ben, an ancestor of Trevor's whose clandestine sexuality constitutes one of the myriad family secrets he must unravel in order to set things right.

The first few chapters of "A Sudden Light" are well crafted and intriguing. Overall, the entire setup is great. It's just the drawn out conclusions that are disappointing, and increasingly more so until they culminate in an eye roll worthy ending that does not do justice to the best parts of this story at all. From the beginning, the main conflict is that Trevor's immediate family has no money, and, we are led to believe, if they did, their problems (the loss of their cozy Connecticut house and Trevor's parents' crumbling marriage) would be solved. Trevor's father Jones has a plan: join forces with his kooky, initially intriguingly eccentric but soon annoyingly strange sister, Trevor's Aunt Serena, to coerce his supposedly dementia ridden father, Grandpa Samuel, into signing over power of attorney to his children so that the two hundred acre Riddell House can be sold and developed and everybody can walk away with his own life changing share of the sale.

Due to the very fact that this is a book and we are told of the aforementioned objective immediately, it is implied that our first person protagonist, who clumsily fluctuates between his fourteen-year-old and adult retrospective narrative voices, will begin to question the morality of Jones and Serena's ambitions as the story unfolds. Unfortunately, this clearly foreshadowed plot development is pretty much the only complication that, as someone who curiously devoured the first half of this book and resentfully trudged through the rest, I was able to find in "A Sudden Light" at all. The reasons why Trevor begins to question it--decades old journals, persistent spirits, a sociopathic aunt--are interesting when first introduced, but are otherwise poorly utilized and make repeat appearances almost exclusively to facilitate irritatingly transparent info-dumps that relay information readers should have been led to by more inventive means. In this way the title of this book is a misnomer; the story is laborious and Riddell-ed with so many revelations that it reaches a point where none of them truly feels jarring or illuminating at all.

This is not to diminish how spectacular some of Stein's writing really is. The planting and payoff (how did Grandpa Samuel lose his fingers? Why is the clock stopped at 6:15? What does Grandma Isobel's mysterious death have to do with Jones getting sent away?) is laudable to say the least, a sunset is uniquely and breathtakingly compared to a muddied boot, and a woman is described as carrying her formidable education around with her like a bag of seeds. Nevertheless, once the plot wanders too far into its own labyrinthine, yawn-inducing third act, writing of that caliber becomes little more than an annoyance; a reminder of the nagging question that, if Garth is capable of creating something better (which he clearly is) then why, instead, did he write this?

Ultimately, such instances of masterful prose feel like a canary's final strangled breaths in a mine shaft, and by its end "A Sudden Light" is such a disappointment, it's all too easy to forget how intriguing Stein's original setup actually was.

"A Sudden Light"
Garth Stein
Simon & Schuster
$26.95