(This may be partly the collision of my expectations as a speculative fiction genre reader and Notaro’s perception of her (predominantly non-genre, I presume) audience — as an sf reader I place a premium on internal consistency, and generally expect (and prefer) quick-on-the-uptake characters. If those aren’t issues for you, you might like Spooky Little Girl better than I did. But on the other hand, I also found the characters a bit thin, and the prose a bit flat, which has nothing to do with genre.)

On the positive side, it did make me chuckle a few times, and it was kind of refreshing to read a mainstream novel with supernatural elements that didn’t go through all the pro forma paranormal romance moves.

needs more demons? Yeah.

Neville doesn’t compromise the authenticity of her teenage narrator’s voice an iota, but she nonetheless conveys more than he is explicitly aware of about the social structures he lives in (and which threaten to constrain his friend Tom). This adds depth that this adult reader certainly appreciated, but Neville is quite subtle about it — there are no omigawd-social-consciousness! hammers being swung around.

If I’d run into this in my early teen years, it might well have been one of those books I literally wore to pieces.

needs more demons? no.

…a car horn rendition of “La Cucaracha” sounded outside. I looked out the sidelights of the front door to see a white van with foot-long wrought-iron ants welded along the roof, making it look like a giant motorized sugar cube at a picnic. The termite guy.

His name was William Watson, and he was carrying a black vinyl binder at least six inches thick. “Call me Bill,” he said twice, once as he shook Greg’s hand, once as he shook mine. Bill was a short, skinny man of about sixty with a well-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and ears that were as gnarled and meaty as tree fungus. He listened to our tale of the previous night’s insect horror with his eyes turned toward the floor, his head cocked as though he were an oncologist and our complaints might hold the first subtle signs of a malignancy larger than we were prepared to face.

I liked Novak’s debut novel Five Mile House, which shares protagonist Leslie Stone, a troubled ex-cop with a lot of baggage. Innocence demonstrates exactly the sort of progress I’d hope for from an author continuing to improve her craft: it’s more nuanced and subtle, more solidly structured, told in a more authoritative set of voices.

The end was a tiny letdown, with most of the plot threads gathered up just a little too neatly and too quickly. The one significant stray thread is likewise a hair too expected, like the question mark floating into a film’s “The End” title card.

In general, though, if I enjoyed every suspense novel as much, I’d read more suspense novels.

needs more demons? no.

Her Fearful Symmetry has many symmetrical sets in it, and a goodly quantity of things that are fearful. The most prominent symmetries concern two sets of twins: Edie and Elspeth (one of whom has just died at the outset of the novel) have long been estranged, with an ocean between them. By contrast, Edie’s daughters Julia and Valentina are so close that their attachment might arguably be described as “unhealthy” — certainly, their mutual dependency makes it hard for them to function as individuals in the world. (In one of several instances of Niffenegger perhaps taking things too far, Valentina suffers from situs inversus, a medical condition that makes her literally the mirror image of her sister, even internally.)

Like Nieffenegger’s first novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, Her Fearful Symmetry has a certain formalism to it, but it’s expressed very differently. Where The Time Traveler’s Wife tagged each scene with the date and age of the principals, Her Fearful Symmetry explores its titular conceit in a balletic area of resonances and inversions among its twinned twins and those close to them: chiefly Robert, a guide at Highgate Cemetary and author of an enormous unfinished thesis on its many occupants, and Martin, a writer sharply constrained by obsessive compulsive behavior.

Niffenegger also continues to display the same extrapolative rigor that marked The Time Traveler’s Wife. When, at a certain point it becomes clear that Her Fearful symmetry partakes of a specific English literary tradition, its characters actually read some of the works to which reviewers might be tempted to compare it.

The Time Traveler’s Wife used its nonlinear construction to examine the trajectory of a relationship. Her Fearful Symmetry uses its devices to explore the consequences of unresolved grief. As such, it’s a much darker book. I enjoyed it more before the tone of it became clear, but found it compelling almost to the end. (The actual dénouement left me a little unsatisfied, even if it was required by the novel’s structure.)

Dept. of Meaningless Coincidence: I finished Her Fearful Symmetry on an airplane. The in-flight movie? The adaptation of Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

needs more demons? no.

But I have some muddled thoughts about how the book was characterized and positioned in the marketplace. (I also just started reading Interfictions 2, the second Interstitial Arts Foundation anthology, so I’m also under the influence of Henry Jenkins’ excellent introduction, which has me seeing the world through interstitial-colored glasses).

Of course, The Time Traveler’s Wife has been wildly successful, with over two and a half million copies sold to date, earning Niffenegger a reported five million dollar advance for her following novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. So my remarks should probably be taken with a lot of salt; luck and celebrity endorsements may not have hurt, but Harcourt’s choices ultimately did well by the book. If there’s any value to my nattering maybe it’s that any fan of this novel who on principle refuses to read anything labeled “science fiction” is more than theoretically capable of enjoying science fiction. But then I think of what the science fiction shelves look like these days — clogged with media tie-ins and supernatural soap operas* — and I almost wonder if the marketing category “science fiction” is now excluding good writing to the extent that good writing with speculative elements should stop labeling itself as such. (Analogously, consider the expectations of books filed in the “romance” section vs. the expectations of books filed under “fiction” that deal with people falling in and out of love).

Anyway, I think The Time Traveler’s Wife is every bit as much science fiction as it is romance. It has at least as much in common with “pure” SF like (most particularly) David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself as it does with fiction that uses unstuckness in time and/or the subjective nature of memory as metaphorical tools to examine the shape of a relationship, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or 500 Days of Summer.

Niffenegger isn’t interested in exploring the nuts & bolts of how time travel actually works (although the character Henry DeTamble certainly is), but she does seem interested in examining how a relationship between people with objectively different timelines could actually work — what the emotional landscape of such a pairing would be like, and how foreknowledge would affect the unfolding of events (Henry’s approach to house-hunting is particularly funny and clever). It’s this decidedly speculative cast that makes me assert the novel is definitively science fiction.** On the other hand, the novel’s two first-person voices have a sureness and attention to detail that makes me think that the story would work (if perhaps not quite as well) if time were untangled for the characters to produce a conventionally structured romance plot. One of the classic “is it science fiction?” tests asserts that if all speculative elements are removed from a story, it must not still make sense. By this standard The Time Traveler’s Wife is definitively not science fiction.

I also really hate the cover, which features a soft-focus very young Clare (from the knees down) waiting for a time travel visit from adult Henry, whose shoes are laid out in expectation of his arrival. (Henry travels in time but his clothes do not.) It manages to look simultaneously be a book-with-woman’s-shoes-on-the-cover (a.k.a. signify ch–kl-t), seem a bit Merchant-Ivory-ish (fine on its own terms, but misrepresenting the amount of fisticuffs and punk rock the book contains***), and bring to the fore the creepy aspects of an adult man visiting a minor with whom he’s eventually going to have lots of sex (Niffenegger mitigates the premise’s inherent creepiness very adroitly, mostly by having Clare be the sexual aggressor at the junctures where it matters, and rigorously maintaining Henry’s refusal to commit statutory rape.) I found the cover so off-putting that I would not have read it if it had not be recommended by my wonderful fiancée.****

Coincidentally, said wonderful fiancée also just wrote about The Time Traveler’s Wife. What are the odds?!

*I read a few of these, but at least I have the grace to be embarrassed by that fact.

**When I was younger and more callow, the world of literature could neatly be divided into “science fiction” and “books I didn’t want to read.” Some of the genre critics implicitly reinforced this, not least with assertions that works by mainstream writers that incorporated sf elements were “bad” when evaluated as science fiction (Vonnegut in particular took a lot of heat). These writers were generally pilloried on two counts: for rehashing concepts already thoroughly explored within the genre, and for a lack of speculative rigor and internal consistency. It took years before I understood how jealousy-fueled these arguments were, but the latter point has some validity: a writer like Vonnegut isn’t at all interested in the mechanics of interstellar travel or whether Ice-nine could actually exists; he’s interested in using these devices as metaphors for examining the behavior (and misbehavior) of 20th century societies in the real world. Niffenegger may or may not be familiar with science fiction’s best time travel books, but she unflinchingly tackles causality and predeterminism, and has several tactics for minimizing the suspension of disbelief required by the novel. It is not “bad” when evaluated as science fiction.

*** Even the choice to include Henry and Clare’s Merchant-Ivory-friendly surnames DeTamble and Abshire in the back cover copy seems slightly suspect.

**** Not that being off-putting to me hurts a book in the marketplace, as established above. I do remember at least one mid-’80s experiment in which a publisher issued a novel with one cover for the science fiction market and another for the disaster novel market, but I don’t remember the book in question at all, so I suppose that experiment did not succeed. A similar approach probably wouldn’t have benefited The Time Traveler’s Wife much — but I would have read it sooner and with less hesitancy.

needs more demons? no.

It turns out not to be a Logan’s Run ripoff after all, but I also didn’t think it was very good. Shade’s Children stitches a bunch of more-and-less familiar sci-fi/horror/fantasy tropes into a fairly original configuration. It held my interest, but wasn’t ultimately a satisfying read. I was reminded of the less successful of William Sleator’s novels, where the literal externalization of adolescent alienation somehow fails to provide thematic resonance. In Nix’s case, that’s partly because his none of his characters achieve real depth. Compared with Sleator, Nix’s psuedo-science is much more pseudo than scientific. Shade’s Children is really a fantasy with science-fiction-y trappings — Nix seems uninterested in making the rules of his grim future internally consistent, so he breaks them whenever it’s convenient for advancing the plot. The climax was also markedly unclimactic; it had had a distinct “I’m bored with this concept so I’ll wrap it up in a couple chapters” vibe.

needs more demons? kinda sorta.

I am Eleanor, and I, like this house, am haunted. I died when I fell from this tower, that window. It is sixty-seven feet from the sill to the stone on which my neck was broken. All a matter of record.

But Five Mile House manages some striking and unusual twists on the theme. Novak uses ghosts as an extended metaphor, mirroring and externalizing internal conflicts. The dominating presence of Five Mile House is not Eleanor, but Leslie Stone, who is haunted by several things, but chiefly by the act of vigilantism that ended her career as a police detective, and estranged her from her family. Stone is initially pretty resistant to the notion that she might also be haunted by a destiny that links her fate with Eleanor’s, perhaps because she doesn’t have room in her life for more haunting.

Whether or not she has room for them, Stone eventually finds herself in some unsettling and unpleasant circumstances. The classic horror fiction trope of the protagonist whom no one will believe arises very organically from the circumstances, as does the threat that motivates her. Stone refreshingly continues to act and think like a cop — if a damaged cop — as the level of weirdness rises around her.

While Stone’s present-day life is unraveling, Novak gradually peels back the century-old mystery of the titular Five Mile House, which turns out to arise from a substantially different mix of jealousy, insanity and revenge than is commonly supposed.

Five Mile House displays some of the weaknesses you might expect in a first novel. Some of the supporting cast are too thinly drawn to avoid cliché and I think there are indications that Novak is still evolving her prose style, but those caveats aside, this is recommended as a nifty, spooky read.

Needs More Demons? Not at all.