Hamptons Gothic - “Conscience Point”

Review by Regina Weinreich

(10/14/2008)    Old Hamptons houses and their environs are rife with possibilities for melodrama, stages for scandals, and dark desires. Think Waugh’s Brideshead, Dickens’s Bleak House, and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

    Erica Abeel, a novelist, journalist, former dancer and professor of French literature, and part-time East Hampton resident, knows the terrain well and imagines this potential in her new book, the entertaining novel “Conscience Point” — all puns on the title intended.

    Ms. Abeel’s protagonist, a concert pianist and TV arts correspondent, Madeleine Shaye, is sucked in by the seductive Ashcroft family of Conscience Point, and has liaisons with both brother Nick and sister Violet. She tells all in the memoir within this novel, a device through which Maddy can set the record straight, or “such is human vanity — to put the world on notice that our little caravan passed this way.”

    It would be shameful, a spoiler, to reveal exactly what these relationships are in this richly drawn portrait of an ambitious yet appealing parvenu’s encounter — indeed, collision — with the wealthy and entitled.

    Contemporary, with references to Manolo Blahniks and their cheaper copies in Harry’s Shoes, Ms. Abeel’s writing features a savvy, satiric view of the back-stabbing publishing and broadcast industries, as well as the classical music world, offering many smart caricatures: “Rowena Grubb, emaciated in crimson pajamas, swooped down on Maddy. ‘How are you my darling?’ She had the haunting gaze of prehuman intelligence. The light of dusk was pitiless. Rowena’s face was smoothed so tightly upward and out, it left nowhere for her smile to go.”

    And colorful, apt asides: “It being a weekday, most of New York’s viable citizens were vertically stacked in airtight office towers. Only the seniors, the downsized, and the homeless were about. Plus your odd lunatic in orange dreads, manning a shopping cart resembling a mobile yard sale. And your backlash stay-at-home moms, piloting Aprica Cadillacs . . . containing giant toddlers who could have been pushing them. ‘I was tempted to steal our Jack Russell’s Valium,’ one mother said loudly. The mothers talked superloud to drown out their sense of inconsequence in a city where only those consumed by busyness could claim to exist.”

    Ms. Abeel is good at incorporating shrewd observations into a structure evoking the literary traditions of Waugh, Proust, Dickens, plus a touch of Stendhal, Nabokov, and Roth. A long-dead character is named a Brontean Linton.

    The Dickensian twists involve a hushed-up murder, a mysterious birth, potential incest, a mother and daughter involved with the same man, confrontation (“You fouled your own nest. It’s monstrous. Any decent person would take a deep breath and count to ten. You were the adult”), and a near-fatal car accident on a storm-hounded road (“She saw it unspool in slow motion: the Lexus aquaplaning on the flooded bridge, the green car floating into the black chop, Nick hampered by booze and fumbling to open the door, which self-locked, against the crushing weight of water; saw him entombed in his coffin of fawn leather, lungs flooded, hair streaming upward in the murk, eyes open and sightless like Linton’s angel in Green Glen . . . God tidying the ledger —”).

    Could more drama be packed into one book? As in her literary models, by the end, order is restored. “The trick is to put a little starch in the narrative,” Maddy explains, in writing her story for her grandson, the heir to this Gothic tale and Conscience Point. Fully disclosed, a little tongue in cheek, plot contrivances amuse and satisfy, as does the operatic pitch of the characters: “Her voice a luscious mezzo. ‘No insults. No recriminations — let’s not get down in the mud. Let’s not spoil all the happiness.’ ”

    My only question is, why did they wait for fall to publish this perfect summer beach book?

“Conscience Point”
Erica Abeel
Unbridled Books, $24.95

—

    Regina Weinreich divides her time between Montauk and Manhattan. She has written about Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and is on the editorial board of American Book Review.