THE CLIFFS, by J. Courtney Sullivan
An abandoned house painted purple sits on a promontory overlooking the sea in Awadapquit, Maine. As mysterious houses in fiction often do, it takes on the importance of a central character in J. Courtney Sullivan’s capacious and engaging sixth novel, “The Cliffs.”
Jane Flanagan first spots the house from the water, when she is a teenage tour guide on a lobster boat in the 1990s, earning money during a summer program. Instantly enchanted, Jane cuts her classes in favor of reading the course books under the trees on the property. She explores the house’s nooks and treasures — including a plaque dated 1846 that names the original owner as Capt. Samuel Littleton — with her best friend, Allison, whose family of innkeepers provide Jane with warmth she doesn’t get at home.
Jane then forgets the purple house for over a decade as she moves away from Awadapquit for college, grad school and a career as a women’s studies archivist at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Mass. “Throughout her 20s, she occasionally went on dates, most of them bad and made bearable only by copious amounts of alcohol.” It’s not until she’s 30 and bringing home her boyfriend, David, to introduce him to her family, that she revisits the purple house. All seems promising as the couple “walked to the edge of the cliff, hand in hand, pretending the property was theirs”; but “a fear tugged at Jane’s pocket, whispering that she had only wandered temporarily into somebody else’s lovely life.”
Jane returns to Boston with David, but the house isn’t done with her. Ten years later, an alcohol-related incident has created chaos in both her career and her relationship. Her mother’s death creates an excuse for her to escape to Awadapquit, where she works on cleaning out the family home. Soon the purple house beckons her again when she is hired by Genevieve, the present owner, to discover its history over the centuries, and the possible identity of the ghost appearing to Genevieve’s young son.
Jane’s research is a portal that opens up the novel to aspects of Maine life that are not on the typical tourist trail. Jane learns about the Indigenous Abenaki people in the state and their early engagements and clashes with white settlers, as well as contemporary Native concerns about their tribal status and land and water rights.
There is a wonderful portrayal of a day spent at a Spiritualist enclave called Camp Mira (based on Maine’s Camp Etna), where Jane, Genevieve and Allison seek the identity of the ghost and find workshops on “candle manifestation” and “energy clearing.” They attend a fascinating lecture about children who recall their previous incarnations — one little boy “recalled dying in a plane crash during World War II”; “a 3-year-old in Thailand told his family he was a teacher who had been shot while riding his bicycle to work.” A riveting chapter revives the heyday of the now nearly defunct Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake through the first-person perspective of Eliza, a woman who comes into Captain Littleton’s house as a servant but becomes the loving partner of his widow, Hannah. “The candle blown out, we ran our hands gently, softly under one another’s thin cotton nightgowns,” Sullivan writes in prose attuned to the sensibilities of the era. “Her fingertips like bursts of sunshine on my skin, I held my breath.”
When Jane learns that Genevieve paid to have a cemetery in her yard surreptitiously dug up so she could put in a pool — Eliza’s was one of the graves exhumed — she is horrified. The incident becomes an occasion for a discussion of repatriation of bodies to their original lands and peoples, a good example of how Sullivan weaves in archival detail that is pertinent and interesting, without ever overwhelming the story.
Sullivan takes a deft approach to character development as well, revealing the depths of Jane’s relationship with alcohol, for example, just when the reader is ready for it. While Jane’s arc is one of growth, grounded in realistic complexity, Genevieve too exhibits the contradictions typical of the living; she is convincing in her modern materialism and yet not unkind.
Culminating in a few inspired plot turns that surprise the reader with well-grounded hope, “The Cliffs” is both a mystery and a portrayal of how houses, people and geographical locations are energetic records of what has come before. In the language of the Abenaki, Awadapquit means “where the beautiful cliffs meet the sea.” This skillful novel makes the case that knowing what came before offers us our best chance to truly understand our connections to one another, and what we owe to the land we inhabit.
THE CLIFFS | By J. Courtney Sullivan | Knopf | 374 pp. | $29
