The stopped heart : a novel /

WHEN WE THINK of a haunted house, we imagine its ghosts to be the restless souls of previous occupants, kept by some unresolved horror from complete departure. But perhaps it's possible that the deep grief of someone in the present can actually penetrate the past - can, in effect, haunt those who dwelled here long ago. In Julie Myerson's new novel, "The Stopped Heart," Mary and Graham Coles seek refuge away from London, deep in the Suffolk countryside at the edge of a village, buying an old cottage complete with an overgrown garden and orchard. It's soon apparent that they're enduring a raw sorrow and are hoping for the relief of a fresh start in a place where nobody knows their story. The reader doesn't know their story either, not for a few hundred pages, though hints at the nature of their loss gradually bring their misery not only into present-day focus but also into a curious alignment with events of the past. "The Stopped Heart" has two distinct, interwoven narratives. A first-person chronicle opens the novel, the voice of a young girl who lived in this cottage a century and a half earlier. Eliza's perceptive descriptions of her family and their domestic life, which changes after a redheaded stranger comes to stay, provide vivid testimony to a series of events that grow increasingly horrifying. The other story, which unfolds mostly in close third person, is about Mary's modern-day attempt to settle in. She is haunted by her own despair and heartache - "The lump of grief that never leaves her throat. The hot, shocked space behind her eyes" - as well as increasingly disturbing glimpses of a redheaded man nobody else can see and the fleeting sounds of footsteps overhead, murmuring voices, the noise of phantom children playing nearby. Is she going mad? Or is the history of the cottage somehow seeping into her existence? The novel's parallel stories are told in alternating passages, with only space breaks to indicate the shift between them, which makes keeping alert to the distinction utterly crucial. This may sound like too much work, but it's really not. Instead, there's a rhythm to these purposeful leaps between past and present that becomes part of the experience of reading this increasingly gripping novel, which, like Kate Atkinson's somewhat similarly situated "Human Croquet," rewards the attentive reader. Just as Mary sees and hears traces of former lives in the cottage, Eliza's little sister, Lottie, often makes knowing and matter-of-fact references to the future inhabitants of these rooms. Though nobody else in the family understands what she's talking about, Eliza is inspired to name her kitten "Merricoles" for the flickering future presence of Mary Coles, a "pretty lady with black hair and a very sad face" whose profound unhappiness has made time sufficiently porous to create a ghostly presence. As the parallel events in both strands of the narrative advance, the connecting echoes increase until there's an intersection of sorts: Something from the past is discovered in the present, where it has been buried in the garden for 150 years. Though Myerson is the author of nine novels, it's the first of her three nonfiction books that's most clearly a forerunner to "The Stopped Heart." In "Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House," published in 2004, she researched the stories of those who lived in her 19th-century Victorian terraced house in Clapham, up to her own family's arrival in 1988. She was particularly struck by the discovery that another writer lived there in 1881, a writer with children the same ages as Myerson's. But that's exactly the sort of gold for which she was panning. The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar. The English word for that is "uncanny." KATHARINE WEBER, the author of five novels and a memoir, has just completed her sixth novel. She is the Richard L. Thomas visiting professor of creative writing at Kenyon College.