Novel plays with truth, layer by layer
Although this year marks the 80th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft’s death, the purveyor of baroque dread and menace remains very much alive in the imaginations of a host of American novelists.
The latest result, “The Night Ocean,” by Paul La Farge, is a booby-trapped doozy of a book that’s as challenging and confounding as one of the many-tentacled alien beings in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.
“The Night Ocean” begins simply enough with a mystery. The narrator is Marina Willett, a psychiatrist, whose husband, Charlie, has escaped from a mental hospital in Massachusetts, apparently to drown himself in a nearby lake. Charlie was a journalist and a grade-A nerd. He collected “Star Wars” action figures, played Dungeons & Dragons, and, yes, admired the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
Charlie’s trouble began
when he came across the (true) story of Robert Barlow, Lovecraft’s literary executor. As a young fan, Barlow had struck up a correspondence with the author and, in the summer of 1934, Lovecraft (then in his 40s) spent two months visiting with the 16-yearold Barlow in Florida.
At this point — barely 30 pages into the novel — things get more complicated. Charlie had interviewed Barlow, written a book about him and become something of a literary celebrity until the Lovecraft community began questioning the accuracy of his reporting. The unraveling of his story sent Charlie to the mental hospital, and that, in turn, is the start of ■ Marina’s investigation of her husband’s descent into madness.
The result is a novel composed of narratives and counternarratives, texts and subtexts. It is both homage to and a sendup of Lovecraft and the 19th-century Gothic fantasies that inspired him.
The layering is dizzying. Within Marina’s account lies Charlie’s account of Barlow’s retelling of his relationship with Lovecraft. Within Charlie’s story are additional sources: diaries, letters, transcripts