Antique Horror Show

By ANDREW SEAN GREER

 

As a literary form, pastiche has its pleasures, often witty ones, as the career of Arthur Phillips proves. His first novel, “Prague,” doesn’t immediately read as an imitation, since it tells the contemporary tale of young expatriates in Budapest, loosely based on the author’s own experiences in Hungary. But what about that anomalous section in the middle, a 70-odd-page history of a Hungarian printing family? As if to acknowledge the pleasures of such research, Phillips’s follow-up novel, “The Egyptologist,” dispatched with a contemporary setting and fully embraced historical detail, this time more boldly, recreating the fantasia of 1920s Tut-mania, complete with desert brigands.

 

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Like “The Egyptologist,” this novel has the pleasures of a pastiche — Wilkie Collins simmered to a broth — and yet it is, by its nature, something less than the stories it celebrates. In the acknowledgments to “The Egyptologist,” Phillips paid tribute to “Vivian Darkbloom,” or Vladimir Nabokov in anagram. Here he gestures to another past master: from the moment we see a hysterical woman alone with her haunted child, the silhouette of Henry James darkens the page.

The connection of “Angelica” to “The Turn of the Screw” is perhaps more evident than the link to Nabokov in Phillips’s last book. But while James, with his famous ambiguities, was able to turn the ghost story on its psychological head, Phillips inserts a therapeutic voice: “I rather think a true haunting is less a sudden infestation of transparent pests than a settling of ingredients, the boiling over of a concoction that has been heating for years.” In other words: those ghosts were just our inner selves in sheets.

Interesting, but it tends to wilt the mystery; it is like restoring electricity to a haunted house. In the end, “Angelica” struggles to make sense of the fascinating images it conjures, explaining them at too great a length. It’s as if Phillips means to reassure us that his storytelling is all in fun, that he means no harm.

But maybe novels should do harm. Maybe that’s the great appeal of Nabokov and James, and the weakness of pastiche. Ambiguity may simply be too much for it to hold. I’m reasonably sure Phillips doesn’t believe in ghosts, but does he believe in shadows?

Andrew Sean Greer’s most recent novel is “The Confessions of Max Tivoli.”

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'Angelica'

The author of “The Egyptologist” takes on the Victorian ghost story.

• First Chapter