The Moon Lamp

by Mark Smith

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394498887
• ISBN13: 9780394498881
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

well worth rediscovering

Mark Smith published seven novels between the years 1965 and 1984, including "The Death of the Detective" (1974), which was nominated for the National Book Award. Since that time his ghostly novel, "The Moon Lamp" (1976), appears to have been as thoroughly forgotten as the author himself, but it is a book well worth rediscovering. Set in small town New England, the novel opens in a gregarious, communal voice as the native residents of Nottingham, New Hampshire give their collective view of the Linquists, a Chicago couple past middle age who have moved to the town apparently in hopes of settling there for their retirement. Winnie is a former travel agent and real estate agent, and Greg a former high school drama teacher; their daughter, Penelope, has gone off to college but comes home to visit often. Greg has inherited "the old Hoitt place," and he and Winnie spend a couple of years laboriously restoring an authentic colonial look to the farmhouse. The Linquists' favorite activity during their many dinner parties is to regale visitors with the seemingly innumerable anecdotes related to the ghosts who haunt their home. These stories, always told with theatrical flair, are Greg's specialty. After the opening chapters, the communal voice fades and the novel becomes the intimate story of the Lindquist family and of Winnie in particular: ". . .it was she, we always said, who had the power to have a vision that would be more than just a made-up story." And very soon Winnie does see a ghost. Smith handles this scene with a masterly touch, giving us a most original and unsettling ghostly manifestation. Just at the point when the narrative brings us unexpectedly close to Winnie's perspective, we also find ourselves sharing her intense unease. It is a mark of Smith's craftsmanship that while many ghostly novels are able only to achieve one or two such deeply-affecting scenes, he gives us five or six--gives us one about every other chapter, in fact. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Smith's central theme is a question about what capacity we moderns--connected only in superficial ways to Place, and tending to over-intellectualize everything--have for being haunted. In some backward way hasn't the ghost, as symbol of history and the past, become just another novelty to us? Smith's answer is no; in our fractured world and inside our fractured selves, there are simply that many more dark, uncharted holes where our histories, the specters of our neglect, may retreat to breed and plot against us.