The Ghost Notebooks
$18.00
| Title | Range | Discount |
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| Trade Discount | 5 + | 25% |
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Description
A Belletrist Book Club Pick
When Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe decide to move from New York City to the tiny upstate town of Hibernia, they’re in desperate need of a change: their careers have flatlined, the city is exhausting, and they’ve reached a relationship stalemate. So Hannah accepts a job as live-in director of the Wright Historic House, a museum dedicated to an obscure nineteenth-century philosopher whose life was marred by tragedy.
At first, life in this old, creaky house feels cozy. Nick and Hannah explore the deserted museum at night, wandering the twisting halls and sneakily trying out the former owners’ original master bed. But as summer turns to fall, Hannah begins to have trouble sleeping; reluctantly, she tells Nick she’s hearing whispers in the night. Then one morning, Nick wakes up to find Hannah gone. In his frantic search for her, Nick will discover the hidden legacy of Wright House: a man driven wild with grief, and a spirit aching for home.“What urban couple wouldn’t want to trade the din of the Q train for the sound of crickets, exchange a cramped apartment for a spacious old building steeped in history, only a few hours’ drive from downtown Manhattan? Think again. Ben Dolnick’s elegant, eerie new novel suggests it might be better to stay in Queens… Dolnick excels at creating a subtle, growing sense of unease… The greater mystery unveiled in this powerful novel lies not in spooky atmospherics, but our own failure to connect with those closest to us.”
—Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post
“Looking for another provocative porthole to the past? Try Ben Dolnick’s fourth novel, The Ghost Notebooks. The plot provides a durable framework for Mr. Dolnick’s keen eye for detail and his penetrating ear for dialogue.”
—Sam Roberts, The New York Times
“A missing fiancée and a haunted house in the Hudson Valley are at the enigmatic center of Ben Dolnick’s The Ghost Notebooks, but the real mystery is how well we know those closest to us.”
—Vogue
“An insightful look at our visions and revisions as we grapple with love and grief… You’ll also likely laugh. A lot.”
—Cory Oldweiler, AM New York
“A ghost story, a mystery, and a love story in one.”
—Elizabeth Entenman, Hello Giggles
“Dolnick’s most thematically ambitious work… He has a gift for metaphor, a way of expressing complex emotions and relationships with a pithy comparison that’s easy to understand but genuinely illuminating, and at the same time isn’t a cliché and never feels cutesy… Over a series of short, quietly powerful novels, Dolnick has emerged as an author of compulsive readability and real insights.”
—Ryan Vlastelica, The A.V. Club
“For all its curiosity about things that go bump in the night, the most notable features in The Ghost Notebooks are its qualities of light. Ben Dolnick’s charm, lucidity, and insight will come as no surprise to his growing band of fans. Count me one of them.”
—Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire
“In this compelling mix of love story, detective story, and ghost story, [Dolnick] takes a haunting look at what might follow life.”
—Michele Leber, Booklist
“Hannah loses her job and applies to be live-in caretaker of the Wright Historic House upstate. She and her fiancé Nick leave Astoria with dreams of a simpler, reinvigorated relationship. And then Hannah disappears. This Brooklyn author delivers an affecting and original take on love, loss, and grief in assured writing that is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes in the same sentence.”
—Cory Oldweiler, AM New York’s “Must-Read Books in 2018”
“Dolnick’s immersive novel, about how little people know about their loved ones, adds a supernatural element to that topic . . . Nick’s convincing narration, a chronicle of blind spots and good intentions, is chief among the devices Dolnick deploys to give familiar motifs a contemporary sensibility in this ghost tale, love story, mystery, and bildungsroman.”
—Publishers WeeklyBEN DOLNICK is the author of the novels At the Bottom of Everything, You Know Who You Are, and Zoology. His work has appeared in GQ and The New York Times, and on NPR. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and with his wife and daughter.This guide is intended to enrich your reading group meeting by providing topics of conversation associated with the book. The supernatural elements in the story may invoke lively discussion, so feel free to use these questions as guidelines only, and let your meeting take its own course!
1. How do the quoted signs and teaching materials from the Wright Historic House add to the story?
2. Why does Nick agree to move with Hannah to the Wright Museum?
3. What prompted Nick to propose to Hannah?
4. What do you think Hannah is looking for in her new setting?
5. How would you feel living in a house that is also a museum?
6. The neighbors talk about things happening at the Wright Historic House in the past. What impact do these rumors have on Hannah and Nick?
7. One of Edmund Wright’s quotes is “Oh, what happy hours and torments, what odysseys unwritten and invisible, have taken place within this study’s sorry walls . . .” Describe some of the happy hours and torments Nick and Hannah go through in the Wright house.
8. What are torments that the other occupants of the house (such as the Wrights, the Kemps, or the former caretaker Jim) lived through?
9. Describe the progression of Nick’s and Hannah’s relationship throughout the book.
10. Discuss Hannah’s descent as she becomes obsessed with Edmund Wright’s notebooks.
11. How are Hannah’s notebook entries (as excerpted in the book) an indication of her state of mind?
12. In what way does the episode with the baby birds foreshadow Hannah’s death?
13. How does Nick initially react to Hannah’s death?
14. How was Hannah’s relationship with her parents different from Nick’s relationship with his?
15. Discuss Nick’s time with the Rampes. What about this situation leads to Nick’s breakdown?
16. After Nick leaves the Rampes, he breaks into Dr. Blythe’s office and steals Hannah’s file. How does reading the doctor’s notes affect him?
17. Nick drives back to the museum to find his belongings packed up. He is told by one of the Wrighters that Hannah didn’t die by accident or because of depression, but because she found something out about the house. How does Nick react to this information?
18. When Nick is arrested, he says: “[H]ere it was, finally—the punishment I’d been racing toward.” Discuss what this means.
19. In the mental hospital, Nick meets Jim. What do you think of the story Jim tells him? Do you believe it is true, or is it two mentally ill patients talking together?
20. After he breaks out of the hospital, Nick returns to Wright House, where he dreams that Hannah enters his body, begging for his help. He is exhausted, freezing, and starving. How much of the dream do you believe is real?
21. After digging up Wright’s grave and finding the notebooks, Nick decides to burn the house down. Why would fire be the answer to freeing the ghosts? Is the house itself the real problem?
22. Do you believe in ghosts? Do you think the events of the story are the result of the supernatural or the psychological?
23. In the end, whose notebooks do you think the title refers to—Edmund Wright’s or Hannah’s?
A component of our trouble—the thing that had taken our discontent from the back burner and poured it directly onto our laps—was that Hannah had, a few months earlier, been laid off.
It happened in winter, during an ice storm on a Friday afternoon: she called me crying from the break room and my first thought was that one of her parents had died. Is everything okay? No, she said, she was getting paid off. Paid off? Bribed? Not paid off, you fucking idiot, laid off! Laid off! Fired!
For two years she’d been working at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, standing an hour a day on the Q, eating eleven-dollar salads on Columbus Avenue for lunch. She’d been in their exhibit research department, writing signs and brochures and scripts for the guides to recite while they led tourists through exhibits about New York’s ports and Abraham Lincoln. America’s most popular president, he is commonly associated with Illinois, where he made his mark as a lawyer, or Kentucky, where he was famously raised in a log cabin. Lesser known is the significant role that New York played in Lincoln’s adult life.
“This budget has just been a disaster for us,” her boss explained; they were sitting in exactly the same positions as when he’d interviewed her. “I wish there were something we could do.”
We were lucky enough—i.e., we still had enough money from my job and our savings and our families—that Hannah being laid off was not an imminent practical disaster: we would, for a while anyway, be able to pay the rent, and buy groceries without scrutinizing per-unit prices, and keep our gym memberships. But practical disasters, it turns out, aren’t the only kinds of disasters. In the weeks and months afterward I came to understand, in a way I hadn’t really when my acquaintance with people losing their jobs had been mostly via CNN headlines and Raymond Carver stories, why being laid off—even laid off from a job you’ve enjoyed, as opposed to needed—was always high on the list of stressful things that could happen to a person, and to a relationship. All of our tensions seemed now to have been dipped in a horrible radioactive juice; some nights I’d wake up at three in the morning with my legs sweating only to discover that Hannah was awake and sweating too—we were tangled together like sheets of damp saran wrap.
The first visible outgrowth of her being laid off was that she decided we should move (she spent a great deal of each day demonstrating, via job sites, that the only jobs available in her field happened to be outside the five boroughs). Whether to move was, we both understood, a proxy war over whether to get married. This meant that every job offer she came across led to a tense, desolate conversation about something like the housing market in Philadelphia or the lack of public transit in Atlanta. Many nights, as we sat eating dinner, lifting our forks to our faces with the blank, weary expressions of refugees, I had the feeling that we were actors in a play: The End of Love, now appearing at the Flea, acted with torturous realism by newcomers Hannah Rampe and Nick Beron.
I was working then, and had been for the last few years, as an assistant music editor. This meant editing music for movies, mostly mid-budget dramas that I would never have gone to see if I hadn’t had anything to do with them. I was the assistant to a thin, bedraggled man named Jeremy who did all the actual creative work—the composing and the arranging and the watching and rewatching of the same eleven-second scene, trying to decide whether the emotional tenor of the moment called for an oboe or a muted trumpet. My contribution was more technical than musical; all day I sat in a semi-darkened room in Midtown, wearing expensive headphones, staring at a thirty-inch monitor, adjusting sliders by increments too small to see. My dreams often involved Pro Tools mixing boards, jagged multicolored graphs of sound files.
I’d come to editing as a concession—my plan had been (just as Jeremy’s plan had been) to become a famous, or anyway a renowned, musician.
When I met Hannah I was just at the tail end of the period in which I believed this might actually happen. I’d made the regular station stops: a band that played talent shows in my Maryland high school, a series of tremblingly self-serious demos recorded on an eight-track, a biweekly appointment at the bar in Ann Arbor that paid in drink tickets. I played guitar and bass and piano and wrote songs that my dad, in a reflective mood, once said reminded him of the Cars.
And when I was a couple of years out of Michigan, I put out an album. This seemed, briefly, to be the success that I’d been dreaming of since I was twelve—a record label (now defunct) gave me actual money, I had an album release party, I went on a slightly depressing tour during which I put an incredible number of miles on my Camry. My mom, who’d never quite given up the idea that I should go to business school, sent me a congratulatory bouquet of balloons. Notices were somewhere between respectful and tautological (“Nick Beron’s Pushing Off is a first album by a new singer-songwriter”). An online music magazine I’d only vaguely heard of named me one of that fall’s artists to watch.
It’s hard to say exactly when I decided this wasn’t for me. Some of it was the money. And some of it was that I think I’d believed, without ever quite articulating it to myself, that to release an album was to ascend to a celestial plane from which you only returned in order to play sold- out shows at Radio City and to grant enigmatic interviews to Rolling Stone. That you could have an album out and still need to live with four room-mates in Long Island City, that my life for the foreseeable future was going to consist of opening for friends’ bands and sending out mass email reminders and playing shows for three people in the back rooms of Czech restaurants . . . I peered down the road and I balked. And music editing didn’t feel entirely like a self- betrayal (although my dad, that year for my birthday, got me a T-shirt with the word “sellout” printed across the chest). I was making decent money, I was using my musical abilities, I was occasionally attending premieres where people like Susan Sarandon and Jeff Garlin would waft thanks in my general direction. It was, of course, painful to see how little the world mourned the loss of Nick Beron the musician— there were no puzzled queries from disappointed fans, no pleas from record executives— but I was, occasional midnight pangs excepted, doing fine. Just as the function of most furniture is to fill up a room, the function of most jobs is to fill up a life. By the time I met Hannah it had been a year since I’d last played a show, and I was just becoming practiced at describing myself, with just the right mix of irony and self- deprecation, as a “failed musician.” I was twenty- six, with a beard I liked to scratch in moments of intense self- involvement, and round metal glasses whose lenses were perpetually in need of cleaning. I tended, a few minutes into any conversation, to find a way to mention the stars of whatever movie I happened to be working on, always in a tone that suggested that I wasn’t entirely sure who they were. “That must have been really tough,” she said.
“Which part?”
“Well, you said you always wanted to play music. So deciding to go into editing must have felt, I don’t know, like you were giving up on yourself, maybe. Is that bad to say?”
We had, I want to emphasize, met approximately twenty minutes before this conversation. I’d delivered versions of my music-industry spiel to at least a dozen people, and she was the first one who’d greeted it with anything other than nods of appreciation.
This was in the apartment of another assistant music editor, named Marisa. She’d invited a dozen people over for dinner to see her new place in Crown Heights (white-painted brick walls, sticky floors), and one of them happened to be Hannah, who she’d known at Oberlin. The rest of the guests were musicians, art teachers, personal assistants, one loud-voiced man who made sure that everyone knew he was just briefly touching down between stints in Berlin. This party was in January, so there was an air of picturesqueness: soap-flake snow falling outside, everyone in chunky sweaters.
When Hannah and I told the story of our meeting, we always stopped it at that first conversation about music—I’d given an obnoxious speech, she’d insulted me, and the rest was history. But I don’t think I really took her in until later.
After dinner—we ate spaghetti with capers at a long table that was really a woodworking bench—an activity developed of people trying to light Italian cookie wrappers on fire. The girl who’d brought them said that if you rolled them into a tube and lit them, they’d float up to the ceiling. Hannah was sitting next to me, and we fumbled together with the lighter and the paper, laughing and correcting each other in the way of high school lab partners. She was tall (even sitting down you could tell) with a long neck, dark hair piled on top of her head, dramatic facial angles. Somehow most of her personality was concentrated in her eyebrows and mouth; her default expression conveyed a readiness to find something hilarious or ridiculous. “These things,” she said, watching me fumble with the lighter, “are going to blow like Apollo 13.”
“Apollo 13 didn’t blow up. It reentered safely. That’s why they made a movie about it.”
“Good to know,” she said. (She was highly attuned to the male blowhard, as a species, for reasons that became obvious as soon as I met her father.) She took the lighter from me and leaned over the table to light hers. We sat back. And while the cookie wrappers up and down the table rose in weightless silent majesty, ours tipped together on their sides and smoldered.US
Additional information
| Weight | 7.8 oz |
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| Dimensions | 0.6700 × 5.2500 × 7.9600 in |
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| Subjects | books fiction, fantasy fiction, spooky, basement, notebooks, literary fiction, FIC009050, madness, surreal, Fantasy novel, fiction books, haunted house, realistic fiction books, fantasy book, fantasy novels, fiction psychological, insanity, upstate new york, spirit world, mental hospital, the beyond, dark secret, paranormal, small town, ghost, Ghosts, marriage, tragedy, gothic, horror, secret history, fiction, suspense, Literature, literary, FIC025000, myth, novels, legend, spirits, fantasy books for adults, paranormal romance, science fiction and fantasy |
