All Things Cease to Appear

Consider All Things Cease To Appear a work of literary merit that happens to begin with a murder suspect ruminating on Emerson and an ax in the skull of the protagonist. In other words, author Elizabeth Brundage eludes the general classification of a novel into Genre Fiction or Literary Fiction.
Genre Fiction usually gets divided into romance, horror, mystery, et cetera and then subdivided into cross genres and further complicated taxa. Literary Fiction is both difficult and easy to classify because it resides in the category of books with no category. Literary Fiction is for sale in the section of your book store where the fog never lifts, it’s shelve hanging unfastened between the land and sky. Is All Things Cease To Appear a show more mystery/thriller, a romantic/horror, or a literary fictive with genre elements? Here, context serves as an inside-out metaphor for the content, the imaginary hinterland Brundage creates.
The setting is Chosen, New York, an insular working-class town. George and Catherine Clare, intellectuals from the city, have moved to a house on a foreclosed dairy farm, also the site of the previous family’s tragic self-destruction. While George attends his new position as professor of art history at a nearby college, Catherine forgoes her career in art restoration to become restorian of the spooky, decaying property. She hires the teenage Hale brothers, a sad but bighearted trio, to repaint the exteriors, although she is unaware the house was last the Hale’s home until they were orphaned by their father’s violence and mother’s murder?/suicide.
George Clare teaches study in the Hudson River School of landscape painters, specifically George Innes, whose nineteenth century works were intended to be both observably captivating and spiritually experiential. Meanwhile Catherine Clare is experiencing her own metaphysical shift. She relies on the Hale boys and other new local friendships to navigate passage through her collapsing marriage and creeping ennui. George turns out to be a character perpetrating frauds, betrayals, and violent acts with sociopathic artifice, which culminates in his becoming the prime suspect in Catherine’s gruesome murder.
In it’s breadth, All Things tells the concentric history of two abused mothers who meet similar tragic fate in the same house at different times. Like any good novel, the story is rich in comparative elements, but referring to Brundage’s elements as ordinary pairings and opposites seems inadequate. Counterpoint might be a closer descriptive (Catherine plays Chopin on piano!), in the sense of independent melodies composed into one harmonic texture: Catherine is the abused mistress of the house, but the ghost of her lost predecessor, Ella Hale, continues to traverse the creaky stairs; the Hale boys still consider the house their property, and yet they are dispossessed from it; the Clares and the Hales are two families at different times appearing, concentrating, and disappearing.
These contrapuntals reflect the novel’s central philosophical platform: reality is a place where morals and meaning are uncertain concepts; time is an ebbing and disappearing focal point; life is a composition of light and darkness- like an Innes landscape that balances land and sky into a vague frontier where all things blend until ceasing to appear. Brundage performs context and content in counterpoint as genre motifs are blended with literary themes and superb prose. In this scene Eddy Hale, working outside Catherine’s house, is both a de facto permanent occupant and a frequent voyeur looking in from the outside:
“Maybe she’d come out to hang the wash. He’d watch her back, her arms reaching up, her elbows as knobby as a garden snail’s. Across the fields that had been his grandfather’s and his great grandfather’s before that, the wind spoke to him. Wait, it said… Now Catherine’s daughter was sleeping in his old room. He wouldn’t tell her. He wouldn’t tell her what had gone on in that house, how his father would come after them, turning over chairs and tables, how his mother would cry up in her room or sometimes sit in one place shaking just a little, like somebody who was scared.”

I suppose genre readers could find themselves disappointed to be led into a four hundred page murder mystery that neither provides a competent detective nor concludes with certainty about who is guilty. It is a risk for Brundage to write a beautiful novel wherein beauty and love depend on the unseen, and the success of heroes and demise of villains depends entirely on implication. As Brundage writes- in fog certain things, certain colors become important. Like Innes’s intention that observers of his paintings would have their souls see what their eyes could not, Brundage shows readers that the division of genre and literary fiction is, like lateral time and universal logic, mere optical illusion. show less

I read ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR because I heard that Netflix based a movie on it ("Things Heard and Seen"). Now I think I will be disappointed in whatever Netflix did with it because it couldn’t possibly be as wonderful as this book.

Right away the novel lets you know that Catherine Clare has been murdered in her home, her four-year-old daughter, Frannie, was there at the time of the murder and for hours after, and her husband, George, may have done it. Flashbacks make up most of the rest of the book. Was George, in fact, guilty? Is he a sociopath, maybe a serial killer, or did he just cheat on his wife?

I heard that the movie concentrates on supernatural happenings in the old farmhouse where Catherine, George, and Frannie lived much show more more than the novel does. Maybe that's why their titles differ. But throughout the flashbacks in ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR, Catherine did suspect that the ghost of the woman who had previously lived there was in the same room with her.

My impression of the novel is that characterization, especially of George but also of Catherine, his colleagues, and their neighbors in the small town of Chosen, far exceeds the supernatural in importance. You’ll learn more and more about each but especially about George as the book continues. And the more you learn, the worse you’ll feel about him.

Although I loved this book, I still say that the author was inconsiderate not to include quotation marks. show less

Though this was not my typical read, I admit that I grew intrigued in this self described murder mystery with haunting overtones. Interestingly it begins with a brutal axe murder, where Catherine, the novel's most sympathetic character, has been killed. The author then flashes back to provide the background on a number of characters that will become integral to the story. George, her husband, reminds me a lot of Lotto from Groff's Fates and Furies, but has a much darker, psychopathic side. Other characters include the family who lived in the old farm house before the Clare family. The brothers, Eddy, Wade and Cole become close to Catherine, helping her fix up what was their house before their parents held hands in bed while the carbon show more monoxide ended their lives. Brundage's construction of the novel allowed her to develop some interesting characters and some, like Willis, a troubled waitress who gets sucked into George's spell, become important to the novel at the end.

On the author's webpage she writes about a farmhouse that she explored with her children and eventually bought. Like this novel this house too had a troubled history and spirits that seemed to linger. "Building a book is something like building a house. You begin with the land, the type of soil and its history, the landscape. You pour your foundation and construct the frame that will support the floors overhead. In this novel, the foundation is made of the bones of a dead woman, a woman I had read about in a newspaper once, whose murder has never been solved. That dark history cannot be contained in the muddy cellar. It rises up through the old wood boards, seeping out through the cracks, filling the empty rooms. It shouts its terrible story in the faintest whisper." show less

The Publisher Says: A dark, riveting, beautifully written book—by “a brilliant novelist” according to Richard Bausch—that combines noir and the gothic in a story about two families entwined in their own unhappiness, with, at its heart, a gruesome and unsolved murder.

Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife killed and their three-year-old daughter alone—for how many hours?—in her room across the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at a nearby private college (far too expensive for local kids to attend) teaching art history, and moved his family into a tight-knit, impoverished town that has lately been discovered by wealthy outsiders in search of a rural show more idyll.

George is of course the immediate suspect—the question of his guilt echoing in a story shot through with secrets both personal and professional. While his parents rescue him from suspicion, a persistent cop is stymied at every turn in proving Clare a heartless murderer. And three teenage brothers (orphaned by tragic circumstances) find themselves entangled in this mystery, not least because the Clares had moved into their childhood home, a once-thriving dairy farm. The pall of death is ongoing, and relentless; behind one crime there are others, and more than twenty years will pass before a hard kind of justice is finally served.

A rich and complex portrait of a psychopath and a marriage, this is also an astute study of the various taints that can scar very different families, and even an entire community. Elizabeth Brundage is an essential talent who has given us a true modern classic.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: A domestic thriller, and a darn unsuspenseful one. There is, as we're all aware, a long tradition in fiction and in fact of men who kill their wives for what seem to outsiders as heartbreakingly trivial reasons. This is one of those stories. It's not in the least mysterious that the murderer is the murderer. It's the reason I didn't give the book more stars.

I gave it as many as I did because Author Brundage writes about how the people in a small, gentrifying community deal with the end of their safety net of decent jobs and affordable housing. The influx of yuppies from the nearby rich-kids' college who just are not like them at all adds stress to the community. The families who figure in the murder case are tied together by their state of limbo. No one ever is charged for the crime. Although, I remind you, there's really just no doubt at all in the experienced reader's mind who did the crime.

Anyway. The way the author slowly, slowly brings the beginnings of justice to the town's unresolved wounds makes it a worthwhile read. show less

It's part murder mystery and part ghost story. It is also a close look at how guilt from the past affects the present and the future...and how what we often want is not what we sometimes get. We learn early on in the story that it’s not only houses that can be haunted...but people also. The novel asks so many questions that can't always be answered without lots of thought such as how well can we really know anyone? Is there even such a thing as evil? Does the spirit or energy last and thrive after death? And maybe the most important...how do we ever heal from violence and loss? It's a read that can only be described as riveting and absorbing.

I enjoyed this novel immensely. The prose was absolutely beautiful, and the story left me speechless. Although it was slow-paced and mentioned a lot of philosophy and art (neither of which I am too fascinated by), everything made sense and fell into place in an enjoyable way. I loved reading from multiple perspectives, even when there were story lines that had nothing to do with the main crime. I felt that those random insights into the lives of others in the community gave the novel more depth. Many reviewers have complained about the fact that there are no quotations used in the entire book, thereby making it hard to see what is a description or thought versus something someone actually said. While I also faced some difficulty in that show more aspect, I could appreciate the effect it created; it made it more clear how fine of a line there is between our inner misgivings and feelings and our outward behaviour and words. And this line was different for all of the characters, so it actually helped me see them as unique entities. I don't know, maybe I'm making it out to be more than it really is, but either way it didn't bother me and didn't hurt the story. There was a supernatural aspect to this novel, that was an interesting touch, but did not really have that much of a purpose and was perhaps unnecessary. Overall, however, I found this novel to be absolutely fantastic and I wouldn't change one thing. show less

ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR - ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE *****

Pratītyasamutpāda

I don’t know if the title of this book is a known saying or epithet, it isn’t credited as such but it brought to mind the pragmatic Sanskrit concept of ‘Pratītyasamutpāda’.

And it was a pleasure to read this book, no, it was more than that, it was a privilege. A beautifully constructed story that luxuriated in the depths of its language. Some perceptive metaphors and observations that make you think ‘Yes, that’s it, exactly’, as you read it. A novel where you savour every word, for every word fulfils its role in this story. Ms. Brundart’s words are characters too.

This is a multi layered fiction; on the surface it tells a chilling, thrilling, show more unsettling tale of families in a small town, an octopus novel with its tentacles delving richly into the psychological, the spiritual, the supernatural, sometimes gothic, sometimes contemporary, moving between time periods. And it’s also an eloquent piece of prose writing where words and phrases can lift and inspire you as only a good writer can do.

The characters are keenly observed and developed, brought to life as we are encouraged to both loathe and empathise and our emotions are manipulated almost but with the assurance that what we are feeling is just how we should feel. The writer seems to be able to get under the skin of all, particularly the women in the novel, despite their difference in age and personality. They are all three dimensional.

In some ways it is a book without a conclusion but paradoxically the conclusion was always there right from the beginning. The plot is almost clear from the start but in a curious way the plot is secondary to the other aspects of the novel, another character, as it were, satisfying its role in this story.

I am tempted to put aside other commitments and seek out all of Elizabeth Brundage’s other work for she is a new writer to me.

But I’ve waxed lyrical about this book long enough. Long enough, I hope, for you to seriously consider reading it. show less