The Guest Book by Sarah Blake

Families are fascinating! There are no two ways about it. Think of the things you've been told about your forbears. Mythic? Fantastical stories handed down through generations that no one had the nerve to question? Am I really related to Annie Oakley because my mom told me so? Did that big old mysterious house on Main Street in Lee mean that our Irish ancestors had money once? What happened to it? Why did my great aunts take in guests in order to stay afloat?

Sarah Blake does a bang up job of helping readers interrogate their own pasts by introducing us to the Milton family,  Ogden and Kitty, old line WASPS who've made their money in banking. We meet them in the mid-1930's when the drums of war were just beginning to sound in Germany. Ogden Milton, a titan of

business, makes a fateful decision that will reverberate through the Milton family for generations even as it remains buried in the memory of only a few.

And this is a novel about memory. It is also about privilege - particularly white privilege - and about identity. It's about what people choose to hide about themselves and about the pain that comes with opening up. Blake has created a wonderfully believable, sometimes despicable, often heartbreaking cast of characters, and set them on a private island in Maine - a place where Ogden, the patriarch, predicts "that everything good will happen." He probably should not have tempted fate.

In an interview, Ms. Blake said that she wanted to show how people react to "hinge moments" in history. As in several novels I've read this year, one of those moments was when people in the United States were hearing rumors about the plight of the Jewish people in Germany and Poland and chose not to pay attention. The late fifties, when we meet Joan, Evelyn, and Moss, the second generation of Miltons, began another pivotal time. 

Women clamored to be more than wives and mothers. Joan Milton takes her own apartment and lands a job in a publishing house. She falls in love with a young Jewish man, Len Levy, whose roommate is black. An aspiring writer and devotee of James Baldwin, Reg Pauling graduated Harvard with Joan's beautiful, sensitive brother Moss, who, though groomed to be a banker, yearns for a life of free expression, writing music and performing in jazz clubs.

During the summer of 1959 these young people, in their naivete, converge on the sacrosanct Maine island where Evelyn's engagement party is in full swing. Each of them seeks a kind of truth, but the truth of the events that transpire on the island that night will be hidden for another generation.

This is one of those wonderful, five hundred page generational sagas that make for impeccable summer reading. It's easy to lose yourself in the family dynamics, not to mention losing yourself on the island that gives the family its identity for good or ill. Blake sets out moral dilemmas for her characters but she does not judge them too harshly. She posits that historically people will learn from their past and grow. But first they must know their history and understand it.