Dutton
Review by Walter Cummins
While reading Karen Winn’s new novel, The Society, a vivid memory of a 1935 James Thurber cartoon kept popping into my head. That one has a large house with the back wall transformed into the face of a woman glaring down at a tiny man nearing the front stoop. Why a cartoon when the ominous novel is replete with menace, captivity, maiming, and death? The oppression depicted in the Thurber is funny in its cleverness, yet insightful. Winn’s Knox mansion in Boston’s Back Bay, home of a secret society, is anything but amusing, yet it shares the sense of a building overwhelming and manipulating the people within, grimly unsettling the characters and perhaps readers.
Winn’s Knox is also alive, literally, speaking as a character at points throughout the novel, committed to guarding its secrets and furious at any human threats to its exclusivity. In fact, in one scene a central character, one who suffers because of her relationship to the building’s history, senses its conscious force: “Vivian feels oddly connected to the place, like—and she dare not tell this to anyone, lest they promptly return her to the hospital for a different reason—like it’s alive in some way.”
While the story takes place in the present, it mirrors the tradition of the Gothic novel set in a foreboding castle of dark passages, shadowy presences, frightening noises, and terrifyingly hidden rooms. Horace Walpole introduced these tropes when he created the genre in his 1749 The Castle of Otranto, in which Prince Manfred fears an ancient prophecy: the castle will pass from his family to its “real owner.” The Society emphasizes a similar threat to the Knox.
While the first Gothics emphasized the unknowns of seemingly supernatural presences, The Society’s accumulating and eventually interlinked mysteries are credible in the context of Boston reality, yet they convey overtones of the eerie.
Sections told from the perspective of two women alternate throughout the novel, with occasional reactions from the Knox as speaker and reproduced letters, notes, and documents. Initially, the women appear to be opposites, Taylor a young awkward nurse from North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and Vivian, a beautiful, elegant Boston Brahmin in her forties.
When the novel opens, Taylor, new to the city and its Massachusetts General Hospital, encounters Vivian when she is brought into the emergency room unconscious after a serious fall. Taylor, aware that she shouldn’t be, is drawn to Vivian because of her exclusive clothing, jewelry, and appearance, radiating an upper class existence far from Taylor’s circumstances. This fixation becomes an immediate bond that leads Taylor to seek details of Vivian’s health and then whereabouts when she disappears from hospital records and is nowhere to be found. Taylor’s quest becomes an obsession.
What follows reveals a multiplicity of unanswered questions associated with the secrets of the Knox and the people in it and those associated with Taylor and Vivian. How might they be connected, if they are? Who is a danger and who can be trusted? The answers for both women keep shifting and become sources of grave apprehension. The unhealthy origins of the Knox and the founders of the society add to the uncertainties about the forces connecting past and present, the mansion as a living entity.
In addition to displaying inventiveness at imagining such a disturbing complexity of unknowns, Winn’s telling is also impressive when presenting the violent dangers of a concluding event—locked doors, fears of being trapped, opium hallucination, smoky confusions about what is actually happening. Finally, a calm emerges and explanations are revealed. But it all has been an adventure.
