The Little Stranger: A Review

Because I loved Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, I eagerly purchased her newest, The Little Stranger back in May, shortly after it had been released here in the states. If I wasn't precisely certain about the premise, I knew that I could trust Waters' sentence-by-sentence sensibility and her immaculate grasp of Britain in the 1940s, which is when this book takes place.

It took me awhile, frankly, to sink in with the story. I found dozens of reasons not to keep going, to look elsewhere, to read other books in between, for the first 100 pages seemed static, possessed of a when-will-something-happen? quality that thwarted my best intentions. Still, this was Waters and so last evening, I sat down with The Little Stranger and told myself that I could do nothing else until I'd finished her book.

I'm glad that I persevered. There is much to learn from the way that Waters fashions sentences and takes her time in this story about a country doctor, a crumbling British estate, and a family that one-by-one succumbs to the possibility of poltergeists. Whether or not this estate house is actually haunted (or simply occupied by increasingly hallucinating persons) is the open question that dominates this book. Waters does an outstanding job of leaving the matter unsettled. She is also enormously adept at imagining the many ways that a ghost might knock about a house, and she does a classy job of making the strange seem absolute—of pushing the impossible up against the mundane, of presenting multiple varieties of innocence and blame, and of leaving it all for the reader to decide.

I enjoyed watching Waters work throughout these pages. Often I stopped to reflect on how different my own approach to storytelling is. I believe, for one thing, in the power of the unsaid and the unseen—in deliberate gaps and break points. Waters believes in methodically exposing every detail, then taking at least one other (sometimes two) glance(s) back. There's something in that, certainly, something to be learned, though the part of me that seeks out the liquid in stories, did hope, in parts, for more momentum here, and less of the claustrophic.

Still, it was by and large a pleasurable read, and now here I am, just back from the bookstore—my second trip in two days. I've got many titles here that I hope to soon be sharing with you. But for now I'm going to take a small reading break and finally fit The Little Stranger up on the shelf.