Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

The Barnes & Noble Review

Fortune's wheel is a harsh chastiser, and those lucky writers who have found heady success with their first books often come crashing down with the second, never to rise again. What's the cause? Do they succumb to nerves from external expectations? Do they secretly feel unworthy? Are our expectations as readers unreasonable? Have they merely been sport for the gods?

The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger's first book, was Cinderella at the ball -- a book that got published without a literary agent behind it, a popular success that was a critical one too. Its distinctive (and, I assume from Niffenegger's acknowledgments, long-steeped) flavor completely eluded the dumb movie made from it. Describing the novel as blending fantasy, science fiction, romance, mild philosophy, and epistolary traditions is technically accurate, but fails to capture its unusual charm: its balance of inevitability and suspense, the importance of conversations both humorous and tersely poignant, the cultural riffs and bookish background of Chicago in the '80s and '90s, the bubble of optimism that buoys it up even in the face of death and decay. It's a great read. Given the weight of expectations (and money) riding on her second book, the conditions were ripe for Niffenegger to dig her own grave. But it turns out that in her second book, Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger gets her characters to do the grisly digging for themselves while she floats out smelling like a rose.

The book is mostly set in London, indeed mostly in, around, and even under Highgate Cemetery. Connoisseurs of graveyards will recognize it as the now lushly overgrown final resting place of Victorians eager to escape the horrors of urban burial where Dickens, among others, described dogs running off with the bones of the less recently departed. Famous inhabitants of Highgate include Karl Marx, George Eliot, and Lizzie Siddal, dug up seven years after her death by her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, when he had second thoughts about publishing those manuscript poems he'd romantically but rashly buried with her. (The story goes that her red-gold hair had continued to grow to fill the coffin, but the red-leather-covered manuscript was worm-holed, damp, and stained.)

The cemetery provides the ground against which twin American young women -- still really girls in much of their behavior and manner, naive and antiseptic -- come to determine the shape of their lives. Julia and Valentina have grown up in the Chicago suburbs. They have taken on some unimaginative generational protective coloration (on tv "President Bush was talking to Karl Rove.... The twins gave the finger to the president and his aide in unison"), but they are in fact rather odd. To begin with, they are physically distinctive -- pale and etiolated -- and there are two of them, identical but flipped: mirror-image twins. They usually dress identically and do the same things. They are striking, and yet somehow insubstantial. Their actions and opinions are curiously trivial. But, as the man said, the prospect of death concentrates the mind wonderfully. The twins first face death at a distance. An aunt, their mother's twin sister, whom they barely knew existed, has died and left them something: her flat, which not only overlooks Highgate Cemetery but is built into its walls. When they move there, death becomes closer.

Even unavoidable. Robert, one of their fellow tenants and their Aunt Elspeth's lover, should serve as an instructive example. He started off visiting the cemetery because he was writing a dissertation about Victorian funerary practices and ended up living next door to it, giving tours of the cemetery, and sneaking in at night. Robert has found that "he liked the cemetery itself much better than anything he wrote about it." That's saying something, because his draft is very long. Their other fellow tenant, Martin, is an obsessive-compulsive crossword-puzzle setter -- the cryptic kind, natch. He escapes the cemetery's influence by papering over his windows. Or does he? For surely he's managed to immure himself in a simulacrum of a crypt. In fact, all of them -- Martin, Julia, Valentina, and even the dead Elspeth -- share Robert's problem: "He began to take the cemetery personally and lost all perspective."

Niffenegger lures us into this sepulchral world, too. For the most part, she shapes her crepuscular atmosphere subtly, even down to using English spellings. As a child, I had a quite distinct sense of certain words when they were spelled the English way: "draught" (which I mispronounced) seemed hollower and more penetratingly chilly than "draft," "spectre" more haunting, and "grey" a wispy whisper of tint. Like the best ghost stories, Niffenegger's ghost story takes shape from evocative foggy patches, half-remembered phrases and twists of plot. It's not exactly deja vu all over again, but Her Fearful Symmetry is a very bookish ghost story. In fact, Elspeth, her ghost, learns a lot about post-life behavior via books -- Henry James, M. R. James, Noël Coward, and Gray's Anatomy.

The Victorians thrilled to ghost stories, creepy ones, of course, but even ultimately comic ones like Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Recently, in the last ten years or so, there seems to have been a resurgence of wonderful, and bookish, supernatural tales: A. S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and Neil Gaiman's Cemetery Book. These books seem to transcend the limitations of pastiche and genre to appeal to people who don't think of themselves as liking science fiction, fantasy, or ghost stories -- and that would include me. Audrey Niffenegger's book -- in which Gaiman appears in the lengthy acknowledgments -- is a worthy addition to these predecessors.

An additional note: Niffenegger has endowed Robert with an extensive admiration for a bunch of famous dead Victorians, but he disdains Mrs. Henry Wood, the author of sensational stories like her bestselling novel East Lynne. Robert might be a happier man today if he'd read her more seriously. The melodramatic East Lynne turns on adultery, disguise, and a dying child. But of the 30 or so novels Ellen Wood wrote, her own favorite was The Shadow of Ashlydyat, a ghost story in which supernatural phenomena are not explained away, and in which (most unusually for the moral Mrs. Wood, whose first novel won an award from a temperance society) an energetic and unscrupulous woman is left unchecked at the end. Both of these novels are still in print more than 100 years later. That's an afterlife to aspire to. --Alexandra Mullen

Alexandra Mullen left a life as an academic in Victorian literature to return to her roots as a general reader. She now writes for The Hudson Review (where she is also an Advisory Editor), The New Criterion, and The Wall Street Journal.

From Barnes & Noble

Like its predecessor, The Time Traveler's Wife, Her Fearful Symmetry has a plot both vividly original and yet evocative of time-etched genres; in this case, the neo-gothic. The story involves Julia and Valentina, seemingly typical American teens who have inherited their aunt's London flat. The apartment, as it happens, sits beside Highgate Cemetery, a shadowy burial place that possesses a presence of its own. To this strange mix, Niffenegger adds a medley of neighbors with whole battalions of obsessions and other disorders. The plot is engulfing, the characters unforgettable.

From the Publisher

Six years after the phenomenal success of The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.

When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt; they only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers -- with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive former lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including -- perhaps -- their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.

Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry: about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life -- even after death.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

Niffenegger slowly draws out the relationship between the indolent young twins in a strange dance that's alternately charming and sinister…Their sisterly devotion sounds sweet until it seems suffocating, with a touch of incestuous frisson that would leave Edgar Allan Poe queasy…keep the children away and dust off the Ouija board; you're about to make contact with something deliciously creepy.

The New York Times - Susann Cokal

…bewitching…Lovers of Niffenegger's past work should rejoice. This outing may not be as blindly romantic as The Time Traveler’s Wife, but it is mature, complex and convincing—a dreamy yet visceral tale of loves both familial and erotic, a search for Self in the midst of obsession with an Other. Her Fearful Symmetry is as atmospheric and beguiling as a walk through Highgate itself.

Publishers Weekly

Niffenegger follows up her spectacular The Time Traveler's Wife with a beautifully written if incoherent ghost story. When Elspeth Noblin dies, she leaves everything to the 20-year-old American twin daughters of her own long-estranged twin, Edie. Valentina and Julia, as enmeshed as Elspeth and Edie once were, move into Elspeth's London flat bordering Highgate Cemetery in a building occupied by Elspeth's lover, Robert, and the novel's most interesting character, Martin, whose wife is long suffering due to his crushing and beautifully portrayed OCD. The girls are pallid and incurious; they wander around London and spend time with Robert and Martin and Elspeth's ghost. Valentina's developing relationship with Robert arouses mild jealousy, and when Valentina pursues her interest in fashion design, Julia disapproves, which leads Valentina and Elspeth to concoct an extreme plan to allow Valentina to lead her own life. The plan, unsurprisingly, goes awry, followed by weakly foreshadowed and confusing twists that take the plot from dull to silly. While Niffenegger's gifted prose and past success will garner readers, the story is a disappointment. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

Twin sisters inherit a London flat, and a bundle of baggage, from their mother's long-estranged twin. Elspeth has expired at 44 of cancer, leaving her younger lover and neighbor Robert bereft and obsessed with her memory. Robert is entrusted with her diaries and named executor of her will, which bequeaths her flat and substantial cash reserves to her 20-year-old twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. Elspeth's twin sister Edie and her husband Jack, a Chicago banker, receive nothing and are expressly forbidden to visit the flat. Presumably, Elspeth's hostility stems from the fact that, 20 years before, Edie had eloped with Jack, then Elspeth's fiance, and fled with him to Chicago. When the girls move to London, their own sibling rivalry escalates. Julia dominates minutes-younger Valentina, forcing her to share a life of indolence rather than pursue her ambition to be a fashion designer. Robert, a perennial doctorate candidate writing his thesis on the historic 19th-century cemetery Highgate, is intimately familiar with all manner of Victorian morbidity, including the extreme measures taken to avoid being buried alive. Robert introduces the twins to the all-volunteer staff of Highgate, where many luminaries, including Karl Marx and George Eliot, are buried. Valentina is drawn to Robert, who finds her resemblance to Elspeth uncanny, unnerving and ultimately irresistible. Julia befriends upstairs neighbor Martin, an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobe whose wife, finally fed up with his draconian rituals, has just left him. Meanwhile, Elspeth has returned to her former flat, training her ghostly self to communicate with the occupants. Only Valentina can see her, and she enlists her aunt's aid ingetting free of Julia. The manner in which Elspeth accomplishes Valentina's liberation, and the mind-boggling double cross revealed in the diaries, are breathtakingly far-fetched. Gimmickry, supernatural and otherwise, blunts what could have been an incisive inquiry into the mysteries and frustrations of too-close kinship from the talented Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife, 2003, etc.).

Product Details

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Reading Group Guide

1. What examples and imagery does the novel contain of people being trapped? 

2. After Elspeth's out-of-body experience at the very beginning, the novel progresses a long way in a detailed, naturalistic manner before furtther supernatural events begin to occur. What effect does this structure have on you as a reader?

3. Ghost stories are traditionally frightening. Did you find any passages of Her Fearful Symmetry scary, or do you think the book was not written with that intention?
 

4. Why is Robert unable to introduce himself to Julia and Valentina for so long, and why does he follow them about London?

5. What examples of symmetry and pairings did you find in the book?

6. Do all of the relationships between characters in the book survive intact, or are they changed by events? Do some strike you as more likely to have a future than others?

7. Are there any characters you especially identify with?

8. What role does the Little Kitten of Death play in the narrative?

9. Why is a cemetery like Highgate such a focus of fascination, in reality as well as for the characters in the novel?

10. What do you think happens to Robert at the end of the book?

Read an Excerpt