Mr. Splitfoot (Hunt)

Mr. Splitfoot 
Samantha Hunt, 2016
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544526709


Summary
A contemporary gothic, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.

Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth’s niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant.

After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who—or what— has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?
 
In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole.

A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Pound Ridge, New York, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Warren Wilson College
• Awards—Bard Fiction Prize; National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award
• Currently—lives in upstate New York


Samantha Hunt is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer. Her father was an editor, and her mother a painter. The youngest of six siblings, she grew up in a house built in 1765—haunted not in the traditional sense, but so stuffed with books, good and bad, that it "haunted" Hunt all the same.

She moved first to Vermont in 1989 where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. A later move took her to North Carolina where she earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. In 1999 she headed to New York City to work on her writing, supporting herself with a odd jobs, including a stint in an envelope factory.

Writing
Hunt's novels include The Seas (2004), The Invention of Everything Else (2008), and Mr. Splitfoot (2016). She won the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award and was a finalist for the Orange Prize.

Hunt's short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, A Public Space, Cabinet, Esquire, Believer, Blind Spot, Harper’s Bazaar, Village Voice, Seed Magazine, Tin House, New York Magazine, on the radio program This American Life and in a number of anthologies including Trampoline edited by Kelly Link. Hunt’s play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, was produced by the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/9/2016).)

Book Reviews
I've dog-eared so many pages in honor of vivid prose that my…copy of Mr. Splitfoot curls up with fattened corners. Hunt renders as ornate and magical the tired landscape of Troy and upstate New York—and I say this as a native of that area, with high regard for its quiddities…Hunt's depiction of the seedy terrain of human relations is just as terrific…The novel moves not just in two time frames, told through two voices, a first-person narrator and a third- , but also…in the fourth dimension, stamping itself upon the reading mind. Hypnotic and glowing, Mr. Splitfoot insists on its own ghostly presence.
Gregory Maguire - New York Times Book Review


Samantha Hunt is one of the most inventive novelists working today, and Mr. Splitfoot features her usual imaginative flair…Ms. Hunt is a graceful, sometimes poetic writer who knows how to build suspense.
John Williams - New York Times


The historical and the fantastical entwine like snakes in Samantha Hunt’s fiction...Turned around and around in these woods, you won’t always know where you are, but there’s a rare pleasure in this blend of romance and phantoms.
Washington Post


Mr. Splitfoot [is] at once an intriguing mystery with clues, suspense, enigmas galore, and an exhilarating, witty, poignant paean to the unexplainable, the unsolvable, the irreducibly mysterious...[Hunt's] epistemological and ethical rigor are complemented by a lovely respect for what remains uncategorizable, unable to be mastered or explained away.
Boston Globe


[A] quirky, mysterious novel...Hunt has conjured an unusual and engaging story...Hunt’s aim is not to be believable, but to play with the unanswerable questions and mysteries that underlie life. The emotional connections between Hunt’s key characters are authentic, as is the unusual world she creates at Love of Christ!, and her writing is lively and funny. At times it felt like both Cora and I were on a wild goose chase, trailing Ruth wherever she went, but I gladly followed, eager to reach the surprising conclusion of this enigmatic journey.
Dallas Morning News


[A] wild ride. If you're all about magical realists like Kelly Link, this is one title you'll need to pick up, because Samantha Hunt's third novel takes the banal and rockets it into the fantastic (and the fantastically wonderful). I don't want to divulge too much about this one because I'd rather you read it yourself, but I will say that if you love dual narrative structures or complicated timelines, this is an especially good pick for your must-read list.
Bustle


(Starred review.) [A]a nod to the mid-19th-century legend of the Fox sisters, mediums who conjured up a devilish spirit they called Mr. Splitfoot in order to separate the gullible from their money. The book deftly straddles the slippery line between fantasy and reality in a story that’s both gripping and wonderfully mystifying.... This spellbinder is storytelling at its best.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) This genre-defying page-turner shows off the talent of the up-and-coming Hunt. The narrative alternates between the present and the past.... The plot is a sort of puzzle, revealing the connections among all people and the constant echoes of the past in the present.... [A] ghost story, but it's also a road-trip narrative, a mystery, and a coming-of-age story, told with lyrical language. —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal


You’ll want to savor every fiendish bit of this book...a gothic tale that’s both deliciously creepy and emotionally satisfying, combining supernatural intrigue and thematic weight…. Hunt’s confidence in her story propels the book from page one.... Mr. Splitfoot is about the divide between the natural and the supernatural, between faith and reason, and in the hands of a storyteller like Hunt…the novel becomes something truly special.
BookPage


(Starred review.) Foster children, abandoned houses, and craters left by meteorites weave together a strange and frightening ghost story.... At times, the novel's murky obscurity may be vexing...but the...potent imagery keep the pages turning. A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Mr. Splitfoot...then take off on your own:

1. Talk about the Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission and the "Father" who runs it. Did those kind of places exist in the 19th century? It might be interesting to do a bit of research into the treatment of orphans prior to the mid- to late-20th century in order to ascertain the degree to which the Love of Chirst! represented the norm (Obviously, Samantha's representation is a parody, but even parodies are based on some semblance of reality.)

m. How would you describe Nat and Ruth's relationship? What does it mean that they call themselves sisters?

2. Ruth says that every story is a ghost story. What does she mean? Samantha Hunt has said elsewhere that "To think about 'haunted' is not necessarily a bad thing: to think about our dead in a different way. To use them in some way." How is her thinking reflected in Mr. Splitfoot?

m. What's in a name, especially the name of Mr. Splitfoot? What does the name conjure up in the imagination? For Ruth, "Mr. Splitfoot is a two that is sometimes a one, mothers and their children, Nat and Ruth, life and death." What does she mean?

m.  What do you think about Mr. Bell? Think, too, about his name: the notion of the clarity of a ringing bell. He's a con man, a survivor. How else would you describe him?

m. Cora describes herself as shallow, willing to accept easy answers. How does her journey change her?

m. This is also a book about motherhood. Cora says that people are continually telling her the difficult parts of being a mother, but she's beginning to realize that a mother has to be brave, even fierce. How does this book explore motherhood? What kind of mothers are in this book: good, bad, dead, even nuns. In what ways is the absence of maternal love and guidance felt by the characters? What kind of mother do you think will Cora be?

m. What about the "ghost activist," Sheresa, who always looks out for dead people. What role does she play in the book?

m. Talk about the humor in this book, indeed, some of it is downright silly: for instance, there's the Society for Confusing Literature and the Real Lies" and the mash-up at the event on the Erie Canal with Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, Lord Nelson and a German U-boat. What else do you find funny?

m. At times the events in the book seem completely random and unrelated. How do they eventually come together to form a whole fabric of significance?

m. Mr. Splitfoot explores the boundaries between present and past, life and death, the natural and supernatural. How does the novel blur those boundaries? Where do you place the boundaries? Are the boundaries fluid...or fixed and impermeable?

m. Do a little research about Lily Dale in New York State, and the manner in which it's past and present-day spiritualism informs this novel.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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