A Reunion of Ghosts
Judith Claire Mitchell, 2015
400 pp.

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
June, 2015
Take three sisters on a mission to commit suicide, toss in guilt over an ancestor who perpetrated two of the 20th century's greatest miseries, and you have a ready-made comic novel. Seriously.

For the Alter family, bad luck is followed by more bad luck, the result of a family curse harkening back to the first world war. By 1999, the three middle-aged Alter sisters decide they've had enough—the buck stops with them. They will add their own names to the chart of family suicides that sister Delphine drew up and attached to the back of her bedroom door. So why are we laughing?

The sisters' family memoir, which is part of the book we are reading, is also to be their joint suicide note. Question: "How do three sisters write a single suicide note? A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully."

Seamlessly moving back and forth between past and present, the memoir recounts family history, from the days of Bismark's Germany, through World War I and II, up to1999. It is all told with tremendous wit, as if to suggest that the darkest, most painful chapters of life can never be looked at straight on—they must be deflected by humor, morbid humor.

Funny though it is—and it is often very funny—Mitchell tackles serious cosmic issues, ranging from the meaning or meaninglessness of life, acausal time (all events are random), coincidence vs. synchronicity, and the burden of history—how ghosts from the past continue to haunt the living. Yet Mitchell peppers the pages with puns and word games: why did the sisters' father, Natan Frankl, leave them? "Because Frankl...didn't give a damn."

Just when you think the end is near, Mitchell throws in a curve ball: a sort of ghost appears and opens up the possibility, but only a possibility, for a different ending.

This is a brilliant, tender book about tragedy that can erupt not only on a world scale but in everyday life. Yet the story is also about the consolations of deeply felt love. The Alter sisters are enchanting, and so is Mitchell's wonderful novel.

See our Reading Guide for A Reunion of Ghosts.