The Paper Palace – Miranda Cowley Heller
100-Word (or Less) Synopsis: Elle is giving herself 24-hours to unpack a lifetime of trauma and secrets before deciding whether she will blow-up her marriage to start a relationship with her lifelong friend.
Expectation: The romantic fiction novel du jour.
Reality: An unlikable main character, multiple trigger warnings and still wholly readable.
Recommended For: This buzzed about book won’t be for everyone, but fans of Delia Owens’ “Where the Crawdad’s Sing” will probably like it.
Why I Read It: My husband couldn’t put it down.
My Take:
This is a mostly positive review with a lot of caveats.
First, I was ready to give up on this book after the first 20 percent, because it felt like Miranda Cowley Heller was trying too hard to create a higher brow beach read. I couldn’t help but compare it to Elin Hilderbrand’s “28 Summers,” which also dealt with adultery on Cape Cod.
Second, there’s little character development outside of our main character, Elle. I’m a big fan of multiple points of view, especially when the author wants to explore a life changing situation, but we only got Elle’s side of the story here — a missed opportunity.
Third, I loathe books about adultery. It all seems unoriginal and petty. Especially when we’re expected to sympathize with someone willingly blowing up their life.
But, once you make it through the first quarter of the book — which focuses on the first hours after her and Jonas, a lifelong friend, consummate their previously mostly chaste relationship — “Palace” becomes about 100 times more interesting.
My friend Gail referred to Heller’s plot as “narrative whiplash” and that’s about the best description to give a reader going into this story blind.
We meet Elle in the present, but the rest of the book mostly deals in the past — both Elle’s and that of her mother, Wallace. Through these flashbacks we learn that Elle has never had great relationship role models, and both women were subjected to various traumas, including incest and rape.
Not so lighthearted anymore, huh?
Through these flashbacks, Heller tries to help us understand the circumstances that led to Elle’s and Jonas’ rendezvous and paints a star-crossed romance clouded by an accident for which they were not necessarily guilty but certainly culpable, even if it was justified.
[spoilers ahead]
I’m not here to victim blame Elle, and thankfully, I’ve not experienced the terrible things that Heller puts her though — so this is all Monday morning quarterbacking — but there was a part of me that felt like Elle thrived on the destruction of her relationships and simply couldn’t accept happiness.
She waited 50 years to begin to truly process the darker aspects of her life, and this reflection prompted the affair. She kept secrets from her husband, Peter, and family and never sought therapy — or at the very least a discussion with her mother — of the demons that plagued her.
Elle had a right to be angry — at her mother and father, especially — but she didn’t have a right to create upheaval for her kids and husband. Whether intended or not, I ended up finding her to be narcissistic.
You could argue that she did the best she could to find normalcy despite the events of her life. That given her and Jonas’ potential accountability in the death of Conrad was reason enough not to seek out help or confidants, but I struggle to feel sympathy for people that don’t try to help themselves.
Also, the ending.
I didn’t find it to be ambiguous — she chose Peter — and her swim with Jonas was an attempt to reclaim the nonsexual relationship they had with one another for decades, because he is still an important part of her life.
Taking of your wedding ring to swim in a pond is not uncommon, but I can see how people would interrupt it — and her goading of Peter to swim with her — as a sign that she knew Jonas would be at the pond, and she didn’t know if she could trust herself around him.
Personally, I think Elle and Peter stay together — not as a sacrifice for her children but as an acknowledgement of healing. If she chose Jonas, I don’t know if she ever fully could — and she knows that too. To me, choosing Peter is an act of reclamation.
Also, outside of the long history with Jonas, Peter seemed like much more of a catch.
[spoilers ended]
Even though I didn’t particularly enjoy our main character or many of the scenarios Heller presents, she certainly is a gifted writer that discussed trauma without exploiting pain and truthfully explored the burdens of unresolved guilt and silent suffering.
The audiobook was narrated by Nan McNamara, and it was an unremarkable yet completely acceptable effort. While Elle sounded relatively the same throughout each stage of her life, she did give other characters — most notably Wallace and Peter — some personality.
Rating (story): 3.5/5 stars
Rating (narration): 3/5 stars
Formats: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: March 6 – March 9, 2022
Multi-tasking: Okay. The backward and forward narrative is difficult to track if you aren’t paying close attention.
