Every October, Frances calls her younger sister in San Francisco and asks her home for Thanksgiving, and every year Cynthia says no. That refusal is their arrangement, a way of excusing each other. This year the ritual breaks. Their father, eighty-two, divorcing his second wife and partly paralysed by a stroke, will be at Frances’s table for the first time in a quarter of a century, and Frances begs. Cynthia agrees on one condition: nobody digs up the past. The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne spends the next four days showing how long that promise can survive in a house full of family.

How the Holiday Weekend Works

The setup is simple and tightly timed. Cynthia lands in Boston two days before the holiday, expecting a quiet visit and a research trip to Hartford. Instead her brother-in-law Walter, collecting her at the airport, lets slip that Frances is depressed, barely driving and convinced he wants an affair. He also tells her that the two sisters are driving to Cape Cod in the morning to fetch their father.

That drive is one of the best sequences in the book. At the cottage in Pocasset the stepmother, Ilse, has packed his life into labelled boxes and a bag marked for medications, and she drops a hint that the sisters have misread the whole arrangement. Then the assisted-living home in Watertown turns out to have no room after all. By nightfall the old man is installed in Frances’s bedroom in Concord, and the holiday has a guest nobody planned for. Cynthia, watching her sister’s shaking hands and strangely bright mood, starts to wonder whether the mix-up was a mix-up at all. Much of the early tension in The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne comes from that suspicion, and from how little anyone will say out loud.

Underneath all this sits the old question. The sisters’ mother, worn down for years by Parkinson’s disease and a failing heart, died when Cynthia was thirteen. Their father moved his young mistress into the house two weeks later. The neighbours talked, a cousin wrote to the medical examiner, and the girls grew up sure he had hurried their mother’s death along. Frances, it seems, no longer believes it. Cynthia does. The rest of the household, including Frances’s daughters Sarah, home from Columbia full of political causes, and Jane, a lonely goth teenager who is kinder to her grandfather than anyone, has only ever heard the family legend secondhand.

A Mystery Without a Detective at The Ghost at the Table

What The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne is actually doing is running a whodunit in which the only investigator is a professional fabricator. Cynthia writes a series of novels for girls about famous women seen through their less famous sisters, and she admits early that the job means inventing whatever the archive will not supply. She is now writing about Mark Twain’s daughters. Every scene she reports should be read with that job description in mind, and Berne lets you notice it without ever winking.

The structure supports the trick. Part One is the arrival and the drive, all present-tense logistics. Part Two drops into a long flashback to West Hartford in the year the mother died, and it is the emotional peak of the novel: claustrophobic, specific and genuinely creepy about who was in the sickroom and when. The rest of the book returns to Concord and the holiday itself, so that every carving knife and wine glass is now loaded with what you have just learned.

What works

• The voice. Cynthia is acid, funny and self-lacerating. She watches Frances fuss over teacups and lampshades and cannot decide whether she envies her or pities her, and that indecision powers the book.
• The holiday comedy. The twenty-seven-pound turkey is still frozen solid on Thanksgiving morning, and Cynthia ends up thawing it in the Jacuzzi with Arlen, Sarah’s sharp-eyed college friend. It is the funniest scene in The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne, and it doubles as an interrogation.
• The table toast. When Sarah asks everyone to name what they are proud of, Frances’s answer about reuniting the family lands like a grenade, and the father’s halting, gestured reply is devastating.
• The ambiguity. Berne gives you several plausible versions of the same death and refuses to rank them for you.

Where The Ghost at the Table Gives Ground

The reservations about The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne are about pacing and population rather than ambition.

• The first act is slow. Long stretches go to traffic, tea and furniture before the central question gets real pressure.
• The guests are sketches. Jane’s maths tutor, Walter’s resident and his wife, and Frances’s cheerful assistant mostly exist to be observed, and some of Cynthia’s observations of them lean on stereotype. That is partly her prejudice, but the novel rarely pushes back.
• The final stretch is crowded. Several big events land within about forty-eight hours, and the long reveal of the family’s history arrives as dialogue in a moving car.
• Cynthia can wear you out. Her meanness is the point, and it is still exhausting by the last hundred pages.

Read These Next

If The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne left you wanting more families who cannot agree on their own history, start here:

1. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler for siblings who grew up in one house and remember three different mothers.
2. The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo for sisters whose rivalry outlasts childhood.
3. So Far Gone by Jess Walter, where one holiday argument shapes everything that follows.
4. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow if Cynthia’s research sends you to the real Clemens family.
5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, the other great novel of a failing father brought home for the holidays.

About Suzanne Berne

Suzanne Berne was born in Washington, D.C., in 1961, studied at Wesleyan and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and teaches English at Boston College. Her debut, A Crime in the Neighborhood, set the pattern for her work: menace in pleasant suburbs, seen by someone who notices too much. The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne was her third novel, published by Algonquin in 2006.

• A Crime in the Neighborhood won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999.
• In an author’s note she says she spent three years trying and failing to write a straight historical novel about the Twain daughters before this book took its place.
• Her own childhood nickname was Susy, the name of Twain’s eldest daughter.
• Her other novels are A Perfect Arrangement (2001) and The Dogs of Littlefield (2016).

The Last Word

This is not a comfortable holiday book, and it is not trying to be. The first act takes its time, the supporting cast is thin and the ending stacks its events too closely. But the flashback at its centre is superb, the comedy is real, and The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne asks a question every family dinner eventually raises: whose version of the past gets to sit at the head of the table?

Pull up a chair. Then decide whose story to believe.