Sulari Gentill, The Woman in the Library (New South Wales and London: Ultimo Press, 2022)
“Writing in the Boston Public Library had been a mistake. It was too magnificent. One could spend hours just staring at the ceiling in the Reading Room.”
From the first words of the first chapter, this book flooded me with nostalgia. It was a whole tin full of Proustian madeleines, from the oddly noisy hush of the BPL to the mediocre coffee of its map room café and beyond. Although I’ve moved around a lot, Boston is still the place I’ve lived the longest, and although I don’t live there now, it occupies a unique place in my heart. I spent hours in the Public Library as a student and came to love its democratic reach. On any given day, there would be homeless people napping and reading in a rare warm, free space, right alongside the denizens of the city’s elite universities and institutions. I spent a while trying to describe the specific smell of the place – the mix of books and patina and carpet and humanity – but I gave up. If you know, you know: if not, pay it a visit and breathe in deeply.
This page-turner of a mystery novel is as open-armed as the library itself. It follows the relationship of four strangers brought together by a scream that pierces the library’s quiet: a wholesome slacker from Harvard Law, a heavily tattooed psychology grad student, a handsome novelist with a complicated past, and our narrator, a mystery writer on a visiting fellowship from Australia. The four become fast friends – and are fast embroiled in a tale of murder where nothing is quite as it seems. In the course of untangling what’s going on, they range across the Boston area, from the working-class neighbourhood of Roxbury to the tourist haunts of Rockport, not to mention a sentimental sequence at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square.
But there’s a twist! This is actually a novel-within-a-novel, of sorts. Framing each chapter is the correspondence between the ‘author’ of this novel, Hannah, and her friend Leo. Hannah is in Australia; Leo is her Boston informant. As the real-life author Sulari Gentill explains, this device grew out of her actual friendship with a fellow writer in Boston. In the book, Leo is an aspiring writer as well as an eager supplier of local details that will assist Hannah to make her novel true-to-life. He corrects minor errors in American English and points out possible geographical details to include, all in a pitch-perfect mix of deference and bluster. I’ve heard the United States described as ‘the world’s biggest island’ and some of that American provincialism comes through, too, particularly when Leo lectures Hannah about how race matters in the United States, as though it doesn’t in Australia.
So the Boston in this book is a reflected, mediated one, although it’s clear that Gentill, like Hannah, does her homework – I especially enjoyed the sequence in which the heroine shakes off a tail by leaving Back Bay station and hurrying to catch the Green Line from Copley instead. (You have to appreciate a novel that lets its characters take three out of the four MBTA lines, although she missed a trick not sending them by commuter rail to Rockport.) And there’s one perfect deployment of “wicked” as an intensifier. I realize, to my surprise, that I’ve lost that usage from my regular speech now, which an older version of me might have said is wicked sad. Even stranger is the realization that my Boston now is mediated too, by the layers of distance and nostalgia that separate us, and by my memories of a city that I still love but where I am no longer at home.
The Woman in the Library is also a meditation on home and the shifting meanings of our pasts. I’m grateful to it for giving me a mini-visit back to Copley Square and for reminding me that the places we carry within us are a kind of home too.
I read The Woman in the Library through the BorrowBox app via Manchester City Library. You can find out more about the book and how to read it here.