Novel of the week Francesca Carington
The cinematic mood of Miranda Cowley Heller’s impressive debut novel, The Paper Palace, has a precedent: in the 1990s, Cowley Heller was head of drama series at HBO – who’ve already snatched the film rights for this languorous summer soap about dark and jagged things bubbling beneath the surface.
Elle Bishop has spent each of the 50-odd summers of her life in the backwoods of Cape Cod, in the refined if rundown camp built by her grandfather, jokingly called the “Paper Palace”. After a noisy dinner one evening, with her husband, three children and mother in the house, she leaves her knickers in the pantry and has sex outside with her childhood sweetheart Jonas. Over the next 24 hours, Elle is torn between what she could have had and what she has – the narrative toggling between past and present to lay out the secret binding her and Jonas together.
Elle’s childhood is all tangled families and divorces, flecked with shocks of almost offhand violence – a child crushing a man beneath a horse, abuse revealed while washing dishes. “Divorce is good for children,” Elle’s mother Wallace says. “Unhappy people are always more interesting.” Wallace is the book’s best character, equal parts hippie and snob (“She’s from Delaware,” she says. “No one is from Delaware.”). She instructs her daughter to “Think Botticelli” – to be beautiful, silent and mysterious, never showing what’s going on inside.
But darkness swirls underneath, just as it does in the backwoods, where there are “rough winter storms that eat away the land in greedy bites”. The careful, insistent sense of place is the most remarkable thing about the novel; and makes up for a slight emptiness in Jonas and Elle’s relationship, their meant-to-be-ness more stated than shown. Yet in Cowley Heller’s novel, place and belonging are tied together – and Jonas is as much a part of the landscape as the Paper Palace.