tropes

Review: Goth Girl, Interrupted

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★★★★

Agnes Corey isn’t your typical New York editorial assistant.  She hasn’t earned a degree in publishing, didn’t go to a ritzy college, and her past is “a story of abandonment, foster homes, petty crimes, and state institutions.”

She works at a near-bankrupt Manhattan legacy publisher that hasn’t had a best seller since the early 1990s and is likely to be swallowed up by a conglomerate. That might explain why even as a probationary hire, she’s grossly underpaid, earning much less than the current real-life average salary for her job.

Corey is troubled, vulnerable, poor, plagued by nightmares and memories of her mentally ill mother. Adding to the misery is being so broke she can only afford to live in a crummy hostel until luck and daring take charge of her life. She’s hired to help a famous, reclusive author of a very Gothic novel adored by millions, the novel that put her publishing house on the map. Fans have been ravenous for more content from author Veronica St. Clair, a sequel to be exact, because the first book had an ambiguous ending.

The mansion Corey comes to at night and in the rain (of course!) is like every castle or mansion from Anne Radcliffe through the Brontës to Shirley Jackson and beyond: eerie, overwhelming, oozing menace and mystery. Even better, it was once a mental institution and like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it seems a bit mad itself.

The author name checks plenty of celebrated Gothic works, and the novelist’s name even echoes the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert.  Goodman deftly deploys time-tested Gothic tropes: scary scenery, shadows, the damsel in distress, exploring dark corners, paranoia, claustrophobia, imagined phantoms, dreadful weather, real and misplaced fears–and of course the house that seems like a brooding, malevolent being.

The author can even make the West Village in Manhattan seem creepy and mysterious–at least at night.  She also writes good satire of the publishing business while giving it the ironic hipster appeal of vinyl and flip phones.

As the novel develops, Corey’s nightmares are so intense that they bleed into her everyday reality, in part because she’s a sleep walker. When she starts taking dictation from the reclusive author whose life might echo the storyline of the original best seller, is that fact or fiction?  Is she a remotely reliable narrator?  If she is, can we trust Veronica St. Clair?  The novel more and more feels like a Russian nesting doll as stories keep appearing within other stories.

Readers may either be fascinated or thrown by the way the book slowly drifts into a tale of drugs and Goths in New York whose soundtrack could easily be Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. And the focus on Corey’s dreams can sometimes feel excessive.  For a deeper immersion in the Gothic style, I highly recommend Sarah Perry’s brilliant, beautifully-written novel Melmoth which revisits the 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin and turns it inside out.

Lev Raphael spent his senior year of college reading all the classic Gothic novelists, some of them in period editions.  The author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery, he has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other outlets. His most recently published short story “Lost in London” is a Gothic ghost tale.

Writers: Have You Ever Had Your Work Stolen?

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The New York Times recently did a story looking at possible plagiarism in A. J. Flynn’s best-selling novel The Woman in the Window because it seemed very similar in ssignificant ways to Saving April by Sarah A. Denzil.

This is murky territory, because as someone who’s reviewed crime fiction since the 90s, I find thrillers often work with similar ideas and even plot twists. Is it theft? Or is it the fact that the genre has certain tropes that appeal to readers and smart authors stick to the tried and true?

I have been definitely plagiarized in my own career. Years ago I was the first person studying Edith Wharton to notice that the feeling of shame cropped up all through her fiction. Searching the literature about her, I found that nobody had examined this theme or even remarked on it.  I started publishing articles about shame and her fiction, working with Silvan Tomkins’ Affect Theory.

In addition to unveiling this neglected them, I also discussed works of Wharton’s that had never been written about in any academic article.  I shared copies with one Wharton scholar whose next book lifted my ideas without any footnote. When I contacted her about it, she said brightly, “Well maybe we were working on similar tracks at the same time.”

When I reminded her of the articles I had sent her, she was silent. I asked if she could have her publisher add an erratum slip, which academic publishers do when there’s an error in the text. This small printed slip of paper tucked into a book is an inexpensive way to make a correction or note something was left out. Sounding agitated, she said, “But that would look like plagiarism.”

That was very revealing.

Then there was a less obvious borrowing when a well-known author in The New Yorker lifted something I wrote about Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells in an online magazine. He and I had previously appeared in the same issue of that magazine, so I assumed he had read my article as I had read his there.  I wasn’t being paranoid to think he was lifting what I wrote because a professor at Michigan State University noted the similarity and said, “He owed you a reference.”

More recently, after a terrific week in Ghent, Flanders, and because I’d published travel blogs and a travel memoir, I pitched a “36 Hours in Ghent” article to the New York Times Travel section.  They hadn’t done one before and I was planning a return trip. There was no reply, but this week, sure enough, a “36 Hours in Ghent” article showed up in the Travel section. Was the author working on the same idea seven months ago when I made my pitch? Maybe.  Maybe not. It definitely felt creepy,.  You’d think if the Times had already assigned a piece like that–or was planning to–they would have rejected my query with an explanation.

That’s unfortunately the life of a working writer.  And while I haven’t had direct theft of actual lines, these experiences have been bad enough.

If you’re a writer, have you ever had your work stolen?  Add your comment below.

Lev Raphael offers creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com.  He’s the author of the forthcoming mystery State University of Murder and 25 other books in a wide range of genres.