Publisher's Weekly Review
An intriguing premise shapes Upchurch's new novel (after The Flame Church), in which he subtly explores the ideas of haunting and being haunted, of absence being ``as much of a shape as presence is.'' After 24-year-old Susan Pond marries 39-year-old photojournalist Walker Popman in Seattle, Susan believes that they are being followed on their honeymoon cross-country train trip by a woman she sees everywhere-but whom Walker never notices. More alarming is that, after Walker's untimely death, Susan experiences palpably vivid hallucinations in which she is following a young couple on their own honeymoon. Fearful for her sanity, Susan goes to see Dr. Sidney Plume, a gay psychiatrist who had not only treated Walker but had also been in love with him. Plume, unfortunately, is given short shrift by Upchurch. Although he's a central character, he never comes alive on the page, even as he grapples with the way AIDS is ravaging his friends and community, recalls his sexual awakening and ponders his reasons for becoming a shrink. Another problem is that Walker, as an object of utter fascination for both Susan and Plume, is overexamined, most blatantly in the retellings of his extensive and fairly uninteresting therapy sessions with Plume. But the most crucial character, Susan, is believable, and her strange plight equally so-that is, to discover whom she is haunting, and why. Upchurch's descriptions of concrete places and of Susan's elusive, illusory ``reveries'' are richly toned, merging the real with the marvelous, and his unique plumbing of death's effect on the living is both sophisticated and frankly cathartic. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice Review
Upchurch weaves a ghostly tale in his bifurcated novel about Susan Pond, an artist, and Walker Popman, a photographer, then about Susan's association with gay psychiatrist Jerry Plume and Eleanor, Popman's bisexual ex-wife. A year after Pond and Popman marry, they take a second honeymoon, a transcontinental trip on Amtrak that ends abruptly when, finding themselves with a six-hour layover in Chicago, they rush to visit a museum where Popman drops dead. This death ends part 1 and sets the scene for the remainder of the novel, in which Susan continually feels pursued by spectral figures that lurk eerily in the background. Overshadowing these figures is the specter of AIDS that envelops the novel's substantial gay portion. Upchurch fictionalizes much of what is documented in Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) and Walt Odets's In the Shadow of the Epidemic (1995). This novel bristles with the vitality found in well-controlled writing. Such ironic subplots as Plume's eight-year sexual involvement with his psychiatrist's kleptomaniacal son sustain a high interest level. Recommended for libraries in liberal communities. Upper-division undergraduate and up. R. B. Shuman; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Library Journal Review
A young woman sees the same mysterious face at each stop of a cross-country train trip. A gay psychiatrist is haunted by the ever-encroaching specter of AIDS. These are the intertwining threads of this gothic-tinged literary ghost tale set in Seattle. Susan Pond meets Walker Popman at the newspaper where they both work. An intense relationship and marriage ends tragically when Walker suffers a heart attack during a first-anniversary vacation. Grief then drives Susan both to the office of Jerome Plume, a troubled psychiatrist, and into the arms of Eleanor, Walker's predatory ex-wife. While the novel effectively conveys a mood of ominous unease, Susan is too bland and Plume too unconvincing ever to engage fully the reader's sympathies. Still, a consideration for large public libraries.-Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
CHAPTER ONE Just when Susan started feeling old, Walker made her feel young again. She was twenty-four and he was thirty-nine; it was absurd for her to worry about her age. But it came as a relief when Walker, a photographer at one of the Seattle daily papers, dismissed it as an issue. Susan worked for the newspaper, too, as a receptionist, a job she performed with the same brisk disinterest she had brought to waitressing, being a bicycle messenger and acting as publicist for a film festival--occupations which scattered her energies and offered her a pleasantly makeshift social life, with everything temporary, everything insecure. Her romances had been just as haphazard: a procession of quivery young men with slicked-back hair and restless eyes who were attracted to her calmness, but didn't know what to do with it. Walker knew, even if it did take over a month for him to notice her at her telephone switchboard right outside the photo lab: "Joan isn't back from vacation yet?" This got him a dirty look: "She isn't on vacation. She quit. In June." Far from being put off, he melted at this. His accuser shifted uncomfortably behind the name plaque on her desk, which read "S. Pond." "What does the 'S' stand for?" he asked. She told him. He tried it out: "Susan Pond. . . . I like that." "Good for you," He stared at her brightly. She bared her teeth at him. He winked and left. From that moment he took her over, smoothing his way past her as if he had subjected her to some bland enchantment, a spell more ordinary than any in myth or legend but just as effective. By continuing to meditate aloud upon her name and her thankless role as office dogsbody ("So how are the underlings doing today?"), he managed to get a rise out of her. She knew he was being obnoxious, but there was something so genially perverse about his banter that it made her want to banter back. A few weeks later, while taking a break from the newsroom videomonitors' broadcast of the iraqi invasion of Kuwait-the highlight, so far, of an unsettling new decade--he discovered her doodling pictures of fleeing sheiks on a memo pad. When he asked her about them, she admitted she had done a little life drawing in college before she dropped out. He immediately adopted this as his cause. A skilled draftsman, he fiddled with her efforts and made the sheiks more lively. She watched what he did, and admired the results cautiously. it took passive intruder some more nerve--and several drinks--for her to dig out and show him a few of her college sketches. His verdict: "The human figure's what you have a talent for, so that's what you should work on most. You need to follow your strength." With this, another hurdle was jumped. She trusted him. And increasingly he held her attention by expanding on that trust. He seduced her more deviously--by offering to be her model. They met at her apartment on the Saturday after this informal drawing conference. With some minimal chitchat he disrobed, and she found herself staring at him, not strictly in a spirit of study. He treated his nudity with such nonchalance, however, that she felt honor bound to try to do the same. It would have felt like cheating to admit to an erotic interest in her model. She took up her sketchpad and pencil--only to set them down again. "You want me to pull the shades?" "You'll need the light." "We're sort of high up," she assured him. "I don't think anyone can see you." "Just as long as you can." She started to draw. He was smooth-shaped, solid, self-conscious not in an inhibited way but as though his body were an instrument and he its virtuosic player. His posture was studiedly relaxed, casually observant. His brown hair was thinning slightly at the crown of his head, but this sign of age translated only as a kind of vigor. About thirty minutes into the session, his feet began kicking small kicks, restlessly, of their own accord, and he apologized. "Don't worry," she said. It's a movement I can work with." He invited her to take a closer look--"let's leave the feet out of it. . . ."--and she proceeded to isolate the various sections of his body, observing them as she would a form of wildlife: the deltoid slope from shoulder to breastbone; the swelling path from back to buttocks; the length of his throat as he leaned back and swallowed; a firm but thickish waist; a crowded, muddled groin. Each of these places, as she studied them, suggested a progress toward tenderness. They also triggered in her a surge of nervous energy. She came up close to him--too close--and then found herself yielding to an urge she had been trying to suppress for the last half hour. He drew her toward him and they kissed. His breath had been sweetened by a mint, and his breasts--when she traced her finger across them--turned out to be ticklish. She squatted lower on her haunches. His arousal, by this time, was obvious. A cavernous sensation opened up beneath her which needed to be filled, and she shifted her center of gravity. She had no questions about this. . . . Afterwards, she wondered if the whole life-drawing business might only have been a scheme for getting her into bed. If so, it was dismaying how easily it had worked. Still later in the week, it occurred to her that these feelings were like nothing she had ever experienced. it astonished her that workaday life had room enough to accommodate them! He kept on posing and she didn't get tired of it, so they set a wedding date for September. Walker, in earnest-wanting the marriage to be ironclad, unthreatened--took an HIV test, the implication being that this would help in assessing all inner and outer threats to their union. And his test results were negative, just as Susan's had been a few months earlier when she applied for medical coverage under the newspaper's group policy. From there the engagement proceeded smoothly, apart from Susan's parents' quiet expressions of concern, bordering on disapproval, at her marrying an older man she had known for a mere two months; a man who turned out--as Walker disclosed during his second modeling session--to have been divorced only in May. (The reason for his distraction in June?) Susan thought it wise not to inquire too closely into this failed marriage, but was suggestible to doubt where doubt was planted--and her mother planted it as tactfully as she could. Maybe Walker was "bad husband material." Maybe there was a "problem" Susan ought to find out about. Thus, at her mother's prompting and with Walker's approval, Susan contacted her fiance's ex-wife, Eleanor--a blond Southerner not strident but breezily loud in her contempt for soft things. You'll have a good time with Walker," she declared. "You'll see him through. Or maybe you'll see through him?" Susan, understandably intimidated, made no answer to this. "Either way," Eleanor continued, "I think you've both made a reasonable choice." She gave a flat laugh. "And I'm fond of Walker," she insisted, leaning close. "I think the world of him! But you'll find ways of sneaking around that, I'm sure." Susan was too shy to ask about the choice Eleanor had made in abandoning a marriage to someone she seemed to hold so dearly--or was it Walker who had done the abandoning? When Susan put this question to her husband-to-be, the details stayed vague but the tone was enthusiastic. Walker discussed Eleanor as he might a child he had raised and shaped until she was strong enough to choose her own path out into the world and stick to it. He even called her on the telephone several times in Susan's presence, airing his sanguine feelings about his impending marriage. "There's nothing secretive or shameful about it," Susan tried telling her parents. "A divorce can be a daylight affair--not like Aunt Ginny's. It can end in friendship." They weren't convinced. Or perhaps they understood that their daughter, while comfortable with her fiance's friendship with his former wife, was less than comfortable with the wife herself. They remained polite whenever they met with Walker, but their feelings toward him were guarded. As for Walker's parents, they were old and frail, lived way off in Montana, and apparently felt no need to get acquainted with the bride before the wedding. His sister, Mary, would not be attending the ceremony at all. When Susan asked him why not, he told her, "She's out of touch right now. She can't be tracked down." He wasn't nearly as disturbed by this as Susan was--but, sensing her discomfort, he made a point of explaining about his family and how little they had to do with his life. it was pure chance, he elaborated, that his parents had given him the name of one of his idols, that of James Agee's behind-the-camera collaborator. He had toyed, at an early stage, with changing his last name to "Evans" in homage to his hero; his family name--Popman--had such a silly jack-in-the-box ring to it. But then he had dismissed the idea: "A man should stick with the name he's given." To Susan the notion of a name change wasn't such a weighty matter. How far, after all, could it be from "Pond" to "Popman"? Her willingness to accept the change struck her as something flexible in her which was flexible in all women, and which, in the end, made them stronger than men. As she lay enwrapped in Walker's arms at night in the months that followed their honeymoon, she would even thrill at the thought of the transformation that a name change implied--and at the way a legal metamorphosis, with its simple trick of paperwork, might become a real one.... Copyright © 1995 Michael Upchurch. All rights reserved.
