Fiction Mondays: Her Fearful Symmetry

Last week, I read Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, the long-awaited follow-up to The Time Traveler's Wife. What impresses me about Niffenegger's stories is their ability to successfully fuse genre and literary fiction; The Time Traveler's Wife was a love story wrapped in science fiction, and the new book is unabashedly a ghost story. It's true to what I think is a fundamental rule in good genre works: establish your rules and then see how your characters operate within them, but what brings the book into literary territory is how well her characters are developed, even the one who passes away in the first chapter to later return as a ghost.

Niffenegger widens her scope in this book, pulling a lot of characters and plots together really successfully. The bulk of the story follows Valentina and Julia Poole, who inherit an apartment in London from their Aunt Elspeth. The two are "mirror twins," seemingly identical but actually opposite--Valentina's heart is on the wrong side, for example. When they move to London, they eventually meet their upstairs neighbor, Martin, a crossword-puzzle maker suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder; and their downstairs neighbor, Robert, a PhD student writing his thesis on the nearby Highgate Cemetery. He was Elspeth's lover, and spends the first half of the book in a deep depression over losing her. Eventually, they realize that their apartment is haunted by Elspeth, who eventually manages to communicate with the twins and Robert.

The book, now that I think about it, is about being trapped. Each of these characters finds themselves stuck. Martin's disorder makes him unable to leave his apartment, even though he wants to go to Amsterdam to reconcile with his wife. Robert wants to move on and finish his thesis, but he is mixed up with the twins and Elspeth. Elspeth herself is stuck in the apartment as a ghost (there are other ways she is trapped, but one of those is a big twist at one point in the book.) Valentina wants to get away from Julia but can't.

It's also about twins, and what can sever the closeness between twins. The title is kind of a puzzle--it's borrowed from William Blake, and is a line from "The Tiger"--but I'm not sure who it refers to. Elspeth the ghost? She's a twin, but for most of the book she is not very fearful. But later, she is. And then there's the preceding line, "What immortal hand or eye," which leads me to think it does refer to Elspeth.

I'm not sure this novel had the emotional depth of The Time Traveler's Wife, but I did like to see what the author did with a wider cast of characters. I also enjoyed the geography of this book, where the apartment building was its own character, as was Highgate Cemetery. The characters' tours through the graveyard made me really want to visit, and the last scene in the graveyard (I won't spoil anything) inverted the ghost story formula really well, making the graveyard a place of tragic beauty. This might be Niffenegger's greatest strength as a writer, her ability to make a very tragic moment really beautiful. It's probably best exemplified by a scene early in the novel, when Martin's wife decides to leave him: she doesn't want to ruin any spot in the apartment by leaving a note there, so she suspends it from the ceiling, so that it will appear to be floating in the air when he finds it.