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Review: Alice Sees Ghosts by Daisy Rockwell
Featuring family secrets, spectral visitors, and fabulous women, this book is keen to muddle facile understandings of time and space and questions the assumption that the family unit is a safe space
The International Booker Prize winning translator Daisy Rockwell makes her debut as a novelist with Alice Sees Ghosts, a book laced with grief and bursting with a desire to muddle linear, facile understandings of time and space.
Alice, a white heiress from Boston, who is restrained in her affection towards her Bengali psychiatrist-turned-fiancé Ronit, sets off on a trip to India on the insistence of her grandfather’s ghost. Trained as a man of science, Ronit is wary of Alice’s newfound belief in her ability to receive messages from a spectral visitor with ties to India and long buried family secrets.
With a PhD in South Asian literature, decades of translating books written in Hindu and Urdu, and multiple trips to the subcontinent, it is hardly a surprise that Rockwell’s first novel is set partly in India. Alice travels to Kolkata, Muzzaffarnagar and Mussoorie, with Ronit for company.
Rockwell does not lose the opportunity to poke fun at legions of white American tourists headed to India on a quest. It turns out that, in her twenties, at a yoga retreat in Rishikesh, Alice “contracted amoebic dysentery from Ganga water she had accidentally ingested during a puja ceremony” and picked up head lice from the Scandinavian seekers she shared a room with.
Alice’s response to Ronit’s proposal, before they leave for India, is hilarious and pathetic. Almost as if she is doing him a favour, she says, “This is very unexpected but I suppose we could get married if you wish.” Desperate to hold on, Ronit plays along but Alice’s staunchest ally is Ronit’s mother Debashree, who, unfortunately, makes too brief an appearance. Thrilled to know that her son has finally secured a match for himself, Debashree cannot contain her jubilation.
The narrator notes, “Debashree wondered why her son had not gone for someone more intellectual. He was himself highly educated and had grown up in a literary household.” The fact that Alice has not completed college is a source of concern for Debashree, who is a poet, but she worries whether coaxing Alice to complete her degree would mean transgressing boundaries.
READ MORE: Daisy Rockwell: “I have always known that ghosts are among us”
Rockwell’s refusal to employ the lazy stereotype of the evil, scheming mother-in-law is laudable. The moments of genuine connection between Alice and Debashree are a treat, especially because their exchanges do not revolve around the man that they both love. They are spirited, intelligent and articulate women with an inquisitive and creative bent of mind. They discuss ghosts with the kind of ease that is usually reserved for talking about the weather.
The funniest moment occurs when Debashree tells her husband, a literature professor at Jadavpur University, who reads Slavoj Žižek and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Perhaps you could help her enrol in Jadavpur and then Ronit could practise here for a time.” Debashree appears totally oblivious of the fact that Alice has a whole life back in the United States. Also, she is fine with not having grandkids but doesn’t want her son to be “in an intellectually arid environment”.
The unfolding of Alice’s journey is what the author’s heart is set on, and she approaches it with curiosity and care. The stability that Ronit brings into Alice’s life is juxtaposed against the chaos that Alice’s mother Clare provides. Their equation is well-captured in Clare’s disappointment with Alice’s self-sufficiency. “She’s like a goddamned independent nation state,” says Clare.
Another formidable character is Clare’s mother Nanette, a dignified keeper of secrets, and “a high priestess of decorum and taste”. She is admired and dreaded in equal measure. The author’s emotionally affecting portrayal of Alice’s relationship with Nanette honours both the grief that caregivers have to deal with, and the privileged access that grandchildren sometimes enjoy.
With Nanette’s death, a key moment in the narrative, Rockwell exposes the fragile threads holding families together. When Nanette’s will is read out before Clare and her siblings, all hell breaks loose. The reader is encouraged to question the sanctity accorded to the family unit, and the assumption that it is a safe space. Alice has to jump through many hoops to preserve her sanity but she is lucky because all the benevolent energies in the universe have her back.
The reader does not learn much about her partner Ronit other than his unfailing loyalty. He seems to be an object of interest for Rockwell mainly because of the fabulous women in his orbit. Apart from Alice and Debashree, there is Malini. A Sri Lankan, who was once Ronit’s colleague, and later his wife, is now separated from him and in a relationship with a woman.
In addition to Ronit, Malini leaves her psychiatric practice to pursue ceramics and other traditional crafts. It is not hard to imagine why she found the marriage unfulfilling but the reason behind her professional switch remains a mystery. One wonders why Rockwell chooses not to develop this character further, especially because — as one sees with a character named Biju later in the novel — she does have the skill and empathy required to write an engaging queer character.
Ronit’s sister, introduced as an installation artist in New York, and someone “who showed even fewer signs than he of finding a mate and producing offspring,” exists only as a passing reference. With so many sub-plots hinted at but not developed, one cannot help hoping that Rockwell has a sequel up her sleeve to flesh out their arcs with depth and colour.
That one remembers supporting characters, especially Lawrence Drawbridge, the executor of the will, right up to the end, speaks of Rockwell’s ability to keep readers engrossed.
This book helped me through a period of immense grief, and I recommend it to anyone who has lost a loved one, and is swimming in an ocean of things that will remain unsaid forever.
Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, educator, journalist, and tree hugger.
