Book Club Recap: The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

It’s always a good sign when a novel comes out and there’s an immediate hype around it. The Paper Palace certainly is one of those books— it stirred the readers’ interest before it even hit the shelves.

Personally, I was drawn to it for two reasons: a beautiful cover that promises an amazing sense of place and lyrical writing, and a love story at its heart. I’m always hungry for love stories in Literary Fiction, and they’re so hard to come by.

I imagined a quieter book. Instead, this book threw our book club for a loop, and provided us with one of the most heated discussions to date—both as readers and as writers.

Let’s dive in:

• STRUCTURE

This novel is structured as a dual timeline book. The present storyline unfolds over a course of one day—the day after the protagonist, fifty-year-old Elle, has had sex with her childhood best friend for the first time, while their spouses chatted inside her vacation home. This timeline focuses on the events of this one day, showing how Elle is dealing with what she’s done, and leading up to her deciding which man to choose: her beloved husband Peter, or Jonas, the man she’s been in love with all her life.

The past storyline is there to inform us of the history of everyone involved: Elle’s mother’s backstory, Elle’s childhood, Elle and Jonas’s story, Elle and Peter’s story, and events leading up to the act of love (and betrayal) that happened yesterday. It’s divided accordingly into five parts: Elle, Jonas, Peter, This Summer, Today.

This structure works perfectly for this type of book—when the backstory is too broad to be put into flashbacks, and is essential to show why and how Elle’s ultimate decision in the present is informed by her past.

In other words, the present storyline is the laundry line—a tightrope over which the author hangs bits and pieces of backstory that ultimately inform the resolution of the present storyline question (which is: whom will Elle choose?).

The execution, however, was a point of debate. The first scene in the past storyline is Elle at three-months-old, being rushed to a hospital for an emergency surgery. Since it is told in first POV (as the rest of the book is) the logical question is how does she know what happens, if she’s three months old? She wouldn’t have remembered this particular event from her life. Maybe most readers don’t find this jarring, but as writers, we have been taught that POV character can only know what they know, and see what they see. 

From then, the author actually goes even further into backstory that isn’t her own. We learn her mother Wallace’s backstory—how her mother (Elle’s grandmother) remarried, and how it affected Wallace and her brother. A part of this backstory includes Wallace’s suffering sexual abuse at the hands of Wallace’s stepfather. 

While this piece of family history does reveal something that seems central to the book—cyclic forms of family disfunction and child molestation, most of us felt that this bit (Elle’s mother’s backstory) could have been layered in differently: through internal monologue, dialogue between Elle and her mother, even Elle’s flashbacks of when she actually learned of these events—as opposed to fully-fleshed-out scenes of something Elle has not been present for, or privy to. (In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, for instance, which is also a dual timeline novel, with the past timeline showing protagonist’s childhood, and the present timeline showing her dealing with her mother’s dysfunction, the author does inform us about her parents backstory, but in a way that still honors the fact that she wasn’t there to witness it; she tells us these stories as they were told to her, not as if she was there to witness them).

Another issue with showing Wallace’s childhood alongside some scenes from Elle’s childhood is that many of the characters were so similar it became hard to differentiate Wallace’s story from Elle’s. Both Nannette (Elle’s grandmother) and Wallace (her mother) were similarly fierce women characters, and both Elle’s grandfather, Amory, and her father Henry, were weak male characters. So, when the author would take us into backstory, we were often confused about WHO we were reading about—Wallace as a child, or Elle as a child. 

General consensus was that the structure worked very well for this type of novel, but that it would’ve been less confusing (and thus more engaging) if the author delivered ONLY Elle’s backstory in a form of fully-fleshed scenes, and layered in Wallace’s backstory through internal monologue, dialogue, or flashbacks.

• NARRATIVE DRIVE

It’s often said that there are two ways of creating narrative drive (the thing that makes the reader turning the page)—raising either concern or curiosity for your reader (preferably both to a certain degree).

This story has a fantastic story question that had me turning pages faster than I could read them – who does Elle choose? This question is posed in the very first chapter, and maintained toward the end (maintained, not answered, as this book has an ambiguous ending; more on that later on).

When an author has a story question as clear and compelling as this one, it also gives them some leeway. In their need to learn how the question is answered (and, maybe even more importantly, HOW is her decision informed) the reader will get even through parts that are less interesting, or confusing, or murky. This is why most of us read on even as Wallace’s backstory got tangled with Elle’s backstory and we couldn’t tell one from the other. 

So we can definitely say we were both curious and concerned about how the things will unfold.

Another thing that kept us going is the voice. If I’ve learned anything from the books we’ve read in this book club, is that the narrative drive can be built in one additional way that’s never mentioned in those narrative drive articles—through compelling voice. If the voice is compelling enough, the readers will be enticed to follow it. An arresting voice buys the author the same leeway a compelling story question does. 

Now, listen to this voice—in the very first sentence of The Paper Palace:

Things come from nowhere. The mind is empty and then inside the frame, a pear. Perfect, green, the stem atilt, a single leaf. It sits in a white ironstone bowl, nestled among the limes, on the center of a weathered picnic table, on an old screen porch, at the edge of a pond, deep in the woods, beside the sea.

And then, there’s the last sentence in this chapter, after we’ve learned that she slept with a man who isn’t her husband (mark how the inciting incident happens BEFORE the novel opens): 

“I love you,” he whispered. I gasped as he shoved himself inside me. And I thought: now there is no turning back. No more regrets for what I haven’t done. Now only regrets for what I have done. I love him, I hate myself. I love myself, I hate him. This is an ending of a very long story.”

So, within the first chapter, the author pulls a hat-trick. She hooks us with a clear story question (who does Elle choose?), she imbues us with concern for Elle (just feel the emotions that next-to-last sentence causes) and voice. And wouldn’t you follow that voice anywhere it might lead you?

That’s a LOT of leeway right there.

• AMBIGUOUS ENDING

What’s so controversial about this book is certainly its ambiguous ending. The author leaves some clues, but doesn’t specifically say which man Elle ends up choosing.

A funny moment from our book club—someone asked if everyone knew who she chose, and most people started nodding their heads. But when we actually asked to name the guy, half of our members said Peter, and half of them said Jonas. Ambiguous indeed.

What happens in the last scene (spoiler alert if there ever was one!!) is that she does decide on Peter—she even tells their kids that they are in love and would never divorce. But then she gets up the next morning, and sees Jonas on the other side of the pond, waiting. She takes off her wedding ring, her clothes, and goes for a swim. 

My issue with this ending lies in backstory (past storyline). The past storyline—as all backstory in any book—is there to inform the present. This, I feel, is perfectly evident in this book. It’s Elle’s life experiences—even her mother’s experiences, that she mulls over as she goes through that one day, trying to decide between Peter and Jonas. What that story shows us is a pattern: parents who divorced their partners, fell in and out of relationships that mostly made them unhappy, and children, who they never put first, who suffered greatly in the aftermath of those broken marriages.

In many ways, this ruins Elle’s and her sister Anna’s life. Elle has been subject to sexual abuse as a result of her broken family, and Anna has been permanently damaged by the fact that neither of her parents chose her over their partners. Even Conrad is damaged by the same thing—neither of his parents wanted him.

For Elle, then, to choose Jonas, means to continue the cycle, choose her own needs over her own children, break up a perfectly functioning family, and likely cause them life-long scars and dysfunctions of their own.

And while I’m not arguing that she couldn’t choose Jonas despite this, I needed to better understand WHY she would choose him (if that’s what taking off the wedding ring implied) despite everything she learned in her life. Maybe it was realizing that personal urges are stronger than the sense of responsibility for one’s family, or it’s just human weakness, inability to ward off attraction and long-standing emotions. Whatever it was, it should’ve shed light on her decision. But ultimately, it wasn’t on the page.

• A LOVE TRIANGLE

Pulling off a love triangle can be a tricky feat, because the reader needs to buy the dilemma the protagonist is facing, and not sense in any moment where the author is leading them to. The love triangle in this story is done very well. We bought the dilemma completely (a person’s true love, vs. a loving husband!) and the author was very deft with the way she kept us guessing throughout the book—and even after! on whom Elle chose.

While this was a well-developed love triangle, there were two aspects that felt a bit understated.

1/ In a love triangle, both suitors should be equally developed. 

Many of us felt Peter was developed with more nuance than Jonas was. 

Everything we know about Jonas is from when he was a boy. We don’t know much about him once he grows up, other than he’s in love with Elle, and he’s some sort of a painter (we don’t even know what type of painter and how successful he might be).

The few scenes we see him in in the present timeline, are heated sexual scenes. The connection she feels to him, explained in the backstory, is mostly based on their pre-teen years.

Because she meets Peter at an adult age, and because he is shown in the present storyline more, we get a much clearer sense of who Peter is as a person: his British, wry sense of humor, his kindness that also has an edge, his banter with Wallace, where he often serves as a buffer zone between Wallace and Elle.

2/ The reader should understand what’s at stake with each decision

This goes back to what I just said about backstory feeding Elle’s decision: we get a pretty good sense of what will happen if she chooses Jonas—she will break up her family, and we’ve seen what that meant when her parents (and even her mother’s parents) got divorced, so we have a pretty clear picture what to expect (what’s at stake).

But what if she chooses Peter? I don’t feel we got that part of the equation as clearly. We felt that the author should’ve leaned in more into exploring this. What would it mean if she stayed with Peter? Would she be able to live with the fact that she slept with Jonas? Would she be able to go on with her life knowing what she did? What did it mean for her to explore that territory with Jonas? Could she go back even if she wanted to, or did it open a door to such passion, such longing she couldn’t possibly feel that way with Peter?

• CHARACTERIZATION

Building on the previous point, some of us also thought that characterization was uneven. There were fantastically developed characters (Elle’s sister, Anna, was superbly fleshed-out, as was Wallace, and Peter, and some other characters).

The two characters we wanted to be more developed were Jonas (as explained before—all we know about him is what he was like as a boy, that he is handsome, and that he’s a painter) and Elle. 

Not that Elle wasn’t developed well; we do get a good sense of who she is based on all the backstory we got, but there was something we couldn’t quite put our finger on. 

Here are some examples:

• She is capable enough to get herself on the pill at the age of fourteen, but doesn’t do much more to stop her stepbrother molesting her. 

• On the night of the rape, even though she feels prosecuted by Conrad constantly, she goes skinny-dipping.

• We’re told early on that she was a good child before she had that surgery at three-months-old, but then she became a child who screamed all the time, an angry child: but it’s Anna who is an angry character, not Elle.

There is something about her we couldn’t quite define. There’s a definite lack of agency, but not only in the classic sense—that things tend to happen to her more so than she affects the events in her life. It’s also that we don’t really know what moves her, what she wants, what she stands for.

We know very little about her life in the present day, especially outside Back Woods. Her job is referenced maybe twice, where we learn she teaches literature at NYU (a role that’s not insignificant, and would surely affect someone’s life). What aspects of Peter does she connect to? What aspects of Jonas does she connect to? Is she an artistic soul, and there’s always a disconnect, a part of her that her financial-journalist husband can’t understand the way Jonas does? Or does Peter’s steadfastness provide and anchor, a counterbalance? If we got just a tiny more sense of who she was and what she was about, it would help us understand her more.

• SENSE OF PLACE AND USE OF LANGUAGE

One thing is undeniable. Miranda Cowley Heller can write! Her writing is lyrical, her use of language scenic and engaging. She created a fantastic sense of place, not only of the Back Woods, but also other places she put her characters in over the years; a Connecticut farm, London, New York.

It is with so much love and attention to detail that she depicted the vacation house in Back Woods. Our members loved the sensory information, especially in the very beginning. Toward the end of the novel, some members felt it became excessive, and started to bog the scenes down unnecessarily. 

Sometimes, these descriptions felt like they were there for their own sake, instead of highlighting or affecting something in the story; the atmosphere, reflecting or contrasting the inner feelings of the protagonist, affecting the plot or mood in some way. For instance, toward the end of the book, there’s a scene where she swats a fly, and it twitches on the ground as it dies. We felt it was an unnecessary (if well-written) description.

It’s a good reminder that while beautiful descriptions are most welcome and extremely loved by the readers, they still need to tie back to the story and advance it in some way.

With this minor exception, I don’t think we had one member say they didn’t love the writing itself. The author’s use of language, metaphors, similes, descriptions was simply stunning. 

• STICKINESS

With dark topics it explores, this book was not an easy read. And despite its flaws (which, most of us agreed were few and far between) it has achieved something every writer longs for: this book sticks with the reader long after they’ve read it. Not only because of its ambiguous ending (which does help); but also because it opens a wider discussion on so many levels. Passionate or tender love? Parental duty vs. personal needs? How to cut the vicious circle of generational trauma, and at what personal cost? The stickiness of this book comes from the questions we posed, and the fact the author didn’t push the answer on us. Instead, she gave us both sides of the argument and let us churn it out on our own.

Certainly something to think about if you want to create a book like that yourself!

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