J. Courtney Sullivan returns with “The Cliffs,” ghosts included

The New England landscape was Sullivan’s life, in best-sellers such as “Maine,” “Saints for All Occasions” and “Friends and Strangers.” Such popularity inevitably demands polished, incisive prose, but Sullivan is rightly respected by literary critics; in Victorian-style novels like those she studied at Smith College, she is known for exploring her Irish Catholic roots, mother-daughter relationships and female friendships. In “The Cliffs,” she sticks with what works, adding ghosts to the book’s central mystery, an exploration of the spiritual that further enhances her work.

We first see the haunted house when Sullivan’s protagonist, Jane Flanagan, is in high school. Jane lives with her sister and alcoholic mother in her grandmother’s house in Awadapquit, Maine—a fictional stand-in for Ogunquit, a popular vacation destination. A well-read and virtuous person, Jane spends her time alone in an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of town. Tucked away down a dirt road and on a rocky outcrop, it offers magnificent views of the ocean. Built in 1846, the house is painted purple and fully furnished, and looks as if its residents “took a walk decades ago and never returned.” Jane has no idea who owns the house or what its history is, but her best friend Allison says it has a “strange energy,” suggesting it’s haunted.

Later in the novel, 38-year-old Jane has returned to Awadapquit after studying at Wesleyan University and Yale and landed her dream job at the Schlesinger Library of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, an archive dedicated to the history of American women. Her mother has died, and Jane and her sister (who is now also battling alcoholism) must prepare the house for sale. It’s convenient that Jane has a place to go, as her own drinking problem has put her job and her marriage in imminent danger.

She is still friends with Allison, who arranges an appointment for Jane with a medium. Jane doesn’t believe in such things, but agrees to the session and is impressed by the medium’s claim that a girl who is dating the spirits of Jane’s mother and grandmother wants Jane to deliver a message to her own family. Jane has no idea who the ghost girl could be, and although she doesn’t believe in ghosts or mediums, she is still intrigued.

The purple house’s new owner, Genevieve, has renovated the house into a garish summer home. It’s now gray and open-plan, with an infinity pool on the cliff. Genevieve freaks out when she sees her son interacting with a ghost, and when she learns that Jane is a Harvard archivist, she enlists her to research the house’s previous owners in hopes of finding out who the ghost is—a plot catalyst that allows Sullivan to tell the overlooked stories of women who have lived in the place over the years.

With an eclectic curiosity, Sullivan writes about believably flawed and complicated characters. She presents institutions, their people, and their agendas as we experience them today. Jane’s boss at Harvard is the first black woman and the first openly lesbian to hold that position, and her colleagues discuss how “archives historically dedicated to women could and should adapt to a nonbinary world.” Her colleague Evan has a husband and children and explains that an exhibition he is putting together at a museum in Portland “wanted to center Maine’s indigenous residents rather than exclude them” in an “effort to decolonize the museum experience.”

Such progressive language might irritate some readers, but Jane observes it and questions it at the same time. For example, when she sees a chalk sign outside a trendy cafe that reads, “You are standing on stolen Abenaki land,” she wonders, “What did it mean to acknowledge that this land was stolen if no one had any intention of returning it?”

Sullivan doesn’t seem afraid to take risks with sociologically-tinged fiction. The novel includes sections on the feminist history of spiritualism, the Shaker religion and the repatriation of Native American artifacts; dementia, depression, the “family disease” of alcoholism, and neglected female artists. One topic follows the next. At several points I feared that Sullivan would lose the thread, but she manages to weave all the threads into a coherent and satisfying patchwork of a story.

What is particularly impressive is that she herself seems like a qualified medium and vividly channels the various voices of her characters – including that of one of these ghosts.

Randy Rosenthal is the author of The Messiah of Shangri-La, Dear Burma, and The Orient Express: The Fiction That Brought the East to the West.