Phillips’ Ghost Story Enchants But Doesn’t Haunt

There’s nothing less satisfying than a bad ending to a mystery novel—except one with no ending at all, only themes strewn about everywhere and an excessively long and unnecessary line of accusations made at an innocent and unknowing reader.

It seems that in “Angelica,” the latest novel from Arthur Phillips ’90, the plot builds to such a point that there is nowhere to go but to a tragic stand-still. Perhaps that’s why he recycles the plot three times from the perspective of different characters, and then chooses to leave things in the stylistically most awkward of places: the defensive hands of the bored reader.

Constance Barton is haunted by the fear of death through childbirth, pursued by visions of ghosts and demons coming to harm her 4-year-old daughter, Angelica. Blaming her husband’s malignant intentions, she turns to the advice of a neighborhood spiritualist.

The ghost story is told first from the perspective of Constance, then of spiritualist (and proto-feminist) Anne Montague, then of Joseph Barton, father and husband, and finally of Angelica Barton herself, who turns out to be the surprise narrator behind all the voices of the novel.

Phillips writes in a subtle style that lends the book a charmingly haunted feel. The mystery narrator flits in and out, addressing the reader in one sentence and vanishing in the next. The multiple perspectives ensure that characters are never completely absolved of blame or suspicion. The reader is presented with nothing concrete, nothing completely justified, yet all validated at the same time; the characters are simultaneously good, bad, loving, and threatening.

All is revealed (albeit slowly and sometimes in a contrived way) in a manner that suits the novel, a mystery concerned with the way in which humans turn to the supernatural to deal with notions of identity and an inheritance of our past. Each of the characters is presented, his or her guilt called into question, and then never quite absolved. The heart of the novel is a legitimate mystery about the frustration of not knowing, of producing (whether necessary or not) an unanswerable question that seeks resolution, and this is what gives “Angelica” its momentum and energy.

But that momentum leads only to frustration. At the end, Phillips hands the reader a non-resolution in which a markedly older and less enchanting Angelica openly (and annoyingly) vacillates between the several possible explanations to the mystery. The novel flattens out to become everything it should not have become: material, explicit, and heavy-handed.

Phillips writes of the ghostly nature of life, the spectral view that floats and inhabits each of the characters in the novel, and can never be quite identified and verified. There is a delicacy and frustrating resilience to that specter, that force that maintains the movement and emotion and fear in the world.

The force is something to be reckoned with, but the discovery that the transient narrative force was none other than Angelica herself leads only to disappointment. She is not nearly as conflicted as the story calls for; she is simply petulant and whiny, cajoling the reader for desiring a resolution that he shouldn’t even want or need.

The book would be better if Phillips had cut out the last section and left the novel as a phantasm, a hauntress, a gleam of something mysterious, intriguing, and not so finally resolved and inarticulate. The meat of the novel has momentum, has life and potential to be what it can be: haunting and thought-provoking.

But the ending is fumbling, unappealing, as Phillips summarizes every potential cause for the events that occurred, explicates each meager theme in the novel, and glorifies his own lattice of intricacies. Phillips feels the need to call attention to each of his minor themes and clever puns. Why read at all if the author is going to do all the thinking for you?