The Night Ocean
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, a riveting novel about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends--or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them. A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story "The Night Ocean"); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan -- the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself. As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception -- about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
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I've never read H.P. Lovecraft, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this book, which involves a quest to discover the truth about a book called The Erotonomicon, purportedly written by Lovecraft himself. The Night Ocean is stories within stories, searches for truth in dark places, impersonations (or is it transmigration of souls?), disappearances, and and coming back from the dead.
The story about Lovecraft and his teenage friend Robert Barlow is framed by a present day story about a psychologist, Marina, and her missing husband, presumed dead by suicide. Charlie, Marina's husband, had gone into a deep depression after his intensively researched book about The Erotonomicon was attacked and exposed as a hoax by Lovecraft experts. After Charlie's presumed suicide, Marina re traces her husband's research to try to understand what happened to him. This frame feels essential to the story because it reinforces the themes of the Lovecraft story, but it's also the flimsiest part of the book.
For science fiction fans, this would be a fun book to read because of the history of early “weird fiction” and the cameo appearances by classic authors (Ursula LeGuin was my favorite). I'm still not tempted to read any H.P. Lovecraft on the strength of this book, but I do recommend The Night Ocean as a creepy story that goes deep.
This wasn???t entirely what I was expecting, but it was a pleasant surprise, especially since I blasted right through it. I honestly wasn???t expecting to be so compelled by the prose given the way the book appears to be formatted, but hey: it was very readable despite occasional moments of confusion regarding who was talking at any given point in time.
Just to get this out of the way: no, one doesn???t need to be deeply familiar with Lovecraft???s life, or even Robert Barlow???s, to understand and enjoy this book. As long as one knows that Lovecraft was a deeply racist, classist, misogynistic, and antisemitic person, and that these tendencies appear across all his writing, then one should be fine. And even if one DOESN???T know (though I find that hard to imagine, given that it is 2023 and the most recent brouhaha over Lovecraft???s politics happened way back in the late 2010s - which is around the time this book came out, incidentally), one will find out soon enough in this book. It???s probably one of the main ???true??? things that this book presents. Because what this book is about (among many other things), is truth and lies, and how the latter can sometimes be hard to differentiate from the former if it???s compelling enough.
In line with that, this novel also tries to tackle what happens when we figure out the truth - and the truth turns out to be undesirable or painful (or both). Lovecraft played around with the idea that there are some truths out there that are so destructive, they can literally drive a person mad; this is the most common fate met by the protagonists of his stories. This book does something similar, but the destruction is more on the level of the self, and one???s relationship with other people and the rest of the world. This was, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the novel, and where most of conflict springs from. Does one WANT to believe the story being told? What if it???s not true? How IMPORTANT is it to one that the story being told is true? What lengths will one go to, to determine if it is? And what happens when what one feels doesn???t align with external evidence? Is truth something one FEELS, or is it something one PROVES? Unfortunately, the difference between the two is not always clear - both in this novel and in the real world.
This book also plays around a lot with intertextuality: the way texts reference other texts in various ways both obvious and subtle. This book contains both, with references not just to Lovecraft???s work (though obviously the story references his work the most), but to the immense network of twentieth-century SFF fandom. If one is the kind of reader who???s deeply familiar with the names and faces of that period of SFF, then one will be able to tease out a LOT more references than I managed to, since I???m just not as familiar with all the people mentioned and referenced in this novel. Fortunately there are footnotes provided, so any vague references were at least explained, but I???m sure googling names will prove just as helpful.
Another idea this novel plays with is the idea of people AS stories: that is to say, what makes us who we are, as individuals and perhaps as cultures, is the stories we tell about ourselves, and maybe the stories we tell TO ourselves, too. Is it possible to entirely change who one is just by changing the story around oneself? An interesting question, not least in the age of the internet where it???s easy to change how one is perceived - and therefore, who one IS - just by telling a different story in a sufficiently compelling way.
Overall, this was a really compelling read in ways that I hadn???t expected, but was pleasantly surprised by. It asks a lot of interesting questions about truth and our relationship with the truth, framed around two bittersweet romances, one of which might, or might not, have happened.
