The Paper Palace

4.5★s

The Paper Palace is the first novel by American author, Miranda Cowley Heller. In her early-fifties, Elle Bishop has sex with Jonas, the man she has known since she was eleven years old, against the wall of her mother's vacation cottage in the Back Woods of Massachusetts, while her husband drowses inside. What has led to this shocking betrayal of her happy marriage, and how will it affect all their lives from here on in?

Cowley Heller gives the reader a narrative that describes one August day in 2018 interspersed with incidents from the preceding seventy years that reveals a cast of quite a few not-particularly-likeable characters doing, or being subjected to, sometimes ordinary, sometimes disappointing or disgusting things.

And if that narrative is anything to go by, the protagonist has an unenviable childhood with parents who could be described as the polar opposite of helicopter parents, parents with a revolving door of partners, which might partially explain the puzzling choices she sometimes makes. Her mother, Wallace says "Divorce is good for children. Unhappy people are always more interesting."

There is a large cast of characters of whom to keep track, and readers should be aware that there is copious use of expletives and some explicit sexual description. As the narrative flips between timelines, similar or related incidents echo within adjacent passages.

Some of Cowley Heller's descriptive prose is marvellous: "… all of a sudden his body slumps, as if the sharp blade of discovery has de-boned him" and parts of the dialogue are blackly funny. The ambiguous ending will likely irritate some. An impressive, well-told debut novel.