Bill Kupersmith's Reviews > The Guest Book

Sarah Blake’s The Guest Book struck me as rivalled only by James Gould Cozzens’ By Love Possessed as a depiction of life among the American upper classes in the middle years of the twentieth century. Ogden Milton and his wife Kitty belong to an old-line New York banking family dating back to the 1850s, but what is most distinctive about them is the island they own off the coast of Maine, which Ogden bought during the Depression for $1500. It has a family graveyard and a memorial
Henry, b. 1846, d. 1863
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Far from home.
Which reminded me that a Maine regiment did indeed fiercely defend the Round Top.

The idyllic summers they spend on the island are beautifully summarized here: “And then that year, and the next, there were parties. Then there was light pocking the summer air. Moss brought college boys, and there were girls with short hair and bare legs who talked Plato and played tennis and threw cardigans around their sunburnt shoulders and went down to the deck where there were drinks every night at six. And there was singing. There were square dances in the barn up the hill from the Big House, there were charades in the front room lasting late into the summer night, and friends clapped through the screen door into the darkness, and out into starlight, the sound of low engines and women called one to the other across the night water. There were moonlight rows out in the middle of the Narrows, there were morning swims, and fog-bound drifting sails.” As with "pocking" and also "cascade" as a transitive verb, Sarah Blake's attempts at poetic diction sometimes go over the top.

We follow the Miltons through three generations, but most of the story takes place between the 1930s and 1959, marked by the death of Kitty’s two sons, Neddy who falls out of a fourteenth-story window of an upper-East-Side apartment, and Moss, who drowned. Ominously, the story begins in Germany just as the Nazis are taking over, with Milton about to invest in a steel company. And out to that, we eventually find that Kitty inherits an original sin, a family curse. I may have been a careless reader, because I persisted awaiting finding out what it was, but it had been in plain sight, I simply couldn’t imagine someone like Kitty being so concerned. I felt similarly with racial prejudice introduced by the black character Reg Pauling, who seems to take over the latter part of the story. I was not surprised that the Miltons treated him with every outward courtesy—that is simply what one expects—but I wouldn’t have thought they would see racial inequities as somehow involving them. As Kitty tells her son Moss, who is Reg’s friend and brings him to their island: “‘Enter every room with a smile…Speak, to everyone, regardless of their place, as another human being, a reasonable person—so as to create an atmosphere of good will. That is the best defense against people who haven’t been brought up to know better. You just leave them alone. No one can touch you, then. And you show others the way to be. You lead by that example.’” We always behave in the best of taste. Whatever happens, it cannot be our fault.

Except when our hospitality is abused. If somebody, especially a Jew, should abuse your hospitality, like having sex with your daughter on your lawn and then apparently throwing her in the ocean. Personally, I found the denouement involving Moss and Len Levy and Reg over the top. But then the descriptions of boating and sailing made me feel the author didn’t quite know what she was talking about, especially when she outfitted a dingy with “pulleys” as if it were a clothesline. But if you don’t suffer from class envy, if you’re the kind of person who when overtaken by a Bentley thinks, “Nice car!”—you’ll love the depiction of upper-class life. But I felt as well that the Miltons are totally devoid of anything like spirituality (even at the funeral service of their young son). Everything is on the surface, everything is in excellent taste, everything seems perfectly all right.

I wasn’t surprised that this book also received a lot of DNFs. The Miltons aren’t really worth nearly 500 pages, and their faults, especially antisemitism, are typical of their class and time, which is why I didn’t believe Kitty would have been racked by guilt. But as a picture of the pleasures of wealth and status, it was well realized fantasy.