Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. If Ned’s campaign can stage-manage Anna’s life so effectively, how much of a force is it in everything else? Millet is content to leave the woollier questions unanswered, but the thriller writer in her brings the book to a satisfying climax.Ī top-notch tale of domestic paranoia that owes a debt to spooky psychological page-turners like Rosemary’s Baby yet is driven by Millet’s particular offbeat thinking.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Though she considers medical and scientific reasons for the chatter (“filtered particles from the immense cloud of content carried by those millions of waves that pass through us all the time”), her head is also aswim with stories of mysterious symbiotic tree colonies and a “deeper language, an urge that underlies our patterns of survival.” Rather than feeling like two novels on separate tracks-New Age ramble and evil-ex drama-those threads braid effectively, especially when it comes to politics. Millet has a knack for planting plainspoken, world-weary narrators in otherworldly circumstances, and Anna is one of her sharpest, most intriguingly philosophical creations.
When Anna demurs, Ned turns threatening when she tries to hasten a divorce, Lena is kidnapped.
But Anna has more pressing problems: Ned is running for the Alaska state Senate and wants Anna and Lena to head back to Anchorage to serve as photo-op props. The voices diminished after a year, and a split from her husband, Ned, prompted her to move from her native Alaska to a coastal Maine motel with a decidedly eerie cast in time she’ll learn it’s an unwitting magnet for others with similar conditions. A mother tries to reconcile the voices in her head and an extortionist estranged husband in a peculiar, stirring thriller.Īnna, the narrator of Millet’s 10th novel ( Mermaids in Paradise, 2014, etc.), began hearing an inexplicable “stream of chatter” after her daughter, Lena, was born.
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