Her Fearful Symmetry: A Review

Audrey Niffenegger's new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, arrived two weeks ago from my friends at the Chicago Tribune. I post below the opening grafs of my review. Here is a link for those of you who wish to read more.

Readers’ responses to Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, will depend, I suspect, on how they like their ghosts.

Those who prefer their apparitions straight up, poltergeist-style—banging about houses, turning off lights, writing coy communiqués into the dust of window sills, snuffing the life out of stray cats—will no doubt fall right in with Niffenegger’s tale of a woman who has not, it seems, actually died of cancer in her hospital bed. Those whose relationships with the phantasmic tend toward the meta—metaphoric, metaphysical—may conclude that Niffenegger has come on a tad too strong in her rendering of Elspeth Noblin, the woman who will not die and who, in her spectral afterlife, wreaks havoc on those she purports to love.

In choosing to follow up her immensely popular The Time Traveler’s Wife with a modern-day haunt, Niffenegger has returned to a familiar theme: the impossible yearning bred of unbreachable distance. This is a book in which all the primary characters want what they cannot seem to have. Elspeth wants life. Robert, her lover, wants Elspeth. Elspeth’s two nieces, Valentina and Julia, are in desperate need of some kind of earthly purpose. Even a secondary character, the obsessive-compulsive Martin, longs for the wherewithal to leave the flat into which his illness has trapped him; if he can just find his way out the door, he will find his way back to the wife he dearly misses.