Recommended book “The Paper Palace”: A novel about having and longing

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Westerman reads
Love’s double life: A novel about having and longing

It’s good if grandfather is a specialist. “The only thing you need to know,” the author’s grandfather said before she started writing, “is that a good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end has to shine through from the beginning.”

The ending is indeed gripping, but Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace has a really good beginning. The setting is a summer home on Cap Cod on the east coast of America. On a mild night, pressed against the wooden wall of her holiday home, Elle has violent sex with her childhood friend Jonas. It wouldn’t be that spectacular if Elle’s husband and a few friends weren’t sitting a few meters down the house with the windows open. Happily drinking and completely clueless.

Chaotic family relationships

Elle is 50 years old, has three children, is happily married, everything is fine. That’s how it felt until her childhood friend Jonas vacationed on the island with his family. With the sex on the house wall, a story that began many years ago continues. Jonas was Elle’s boyfriend at the time, they were in love with each other, they had forbidden each other to sleep together. The why will play an important role in this novel, which switches very deftly between past and present.

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For Elle and her sister, the past is marked by chaotic family relationships. The mother marries three times, the stepfathers bring their own children, the patchwork model goes drastically wrong. Elle’s mother takes it easy: Divorce is good for children, she says, because unhappy people are always more interesting than happy ones. Elle only marries once: Peter, a picture book man, loving, attractive, great father and also wealthy. It could all be perfect if it weren’t for Jonas. Now Elle lives two lives. The one she already has. And the other thing she longs for.

A book full of doubts and longing

“The Paper Palace” is the author’s first novel; she was in her mid-50s when she wrote it. Before that, she says, it wasn’t possible, it took a lot of life experience first. With her scripts for “The Sopranos”, “Six Feet Under” or “The Wire” she has long been one of the big names in her industry.

Still, more experience didn’t hurt: she succeeds perfectly in describing those doubts and also that longing that one feels inside when one has already lived a large part of one’s life and no longer knows where to go. Does it take courage to change something? Or courage to leave everything as it is? Will you regret what you do? Or regret what you didn’t do?

The granddaughter implemented the tip of her grandfather, who used to be an editor at a large American publishing house, perfectly. This incredibly good story has a spectacular ending. Because it actually shimmers through at the beginning how it will end, but you can’t be sure for 441 pages.

Published in stern 19/2022