The Guest Book

 

The Guest Book by Sarah Blake

Fiction

2019

Finished on January 6, 2025

Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding)

“Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between.” ~ Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

Publisher's Blurb:

A novel about past mistakes and betrayals that ripple throughout generations, The Guest Book examines not just a privileged American family, but a privileged America. It is a literary triumph.

The Guest Book follows three generations of a powerful American family, a family that “used to run the world.”

And when the novel begins in 1935, they still do. Kitty and Ogden Milton appear to have everything―perfect children, good looks, a love everyone envies. But after a tragedy befalls them, Ogden tries to bring Kitty back to life by purchasing an island in Maine. That island, and its house, come to define and burnish the Milton family, year after year after year. And it is there that Kitty issues a refusal that will haunt her till the day she dies.

In 1959 a young Jewish man, Len Levy, will get a job in Ogden’s bank and earn the admiration of Ogden and one of his daughters, but the scorn of everyone else. Len’s best friend, Reg Pauling, has always been the only black man in the room―at Harvard, at work, and finally at the Miltons’ island in Maine.

An island that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this last generation doesn’t have the money to keep. When Kitty’s granddaughter hears that she and her cousins might be forced to sell it, and when her husband brings back disturbing evidence about her grandfather’s past, she realizes she is on the verge of finally understanding the silences that seemed to hover just below the surface of her family all her life.

An ambitious novel that weaves the American past with its present, The Guest Book looks at the racism and power that has been systemically embedded in the U.S. for generations.

The Guest Book is an exceptional novel and I'm thrilled that my first completed read of 2025 is a 5-star book. With three timelines, often from multiple points-of-view, we come to know the Miltons... and their secrets. The opening chapters take readers to Nazi Germany, but time moves forward quickly and Ogden and Kitty become the proud owners of not only a large summer home, but of an entire island. 

On Germany, 1935:

"It started so slowly, Milton. Coming toward us like a river shifting from its banks, one centimeter at a time. One lie, then the next. Lies so big there had to be a reason to tell them, there had to be some purpose, maybe even some truth--Goebbels is not an unintelligent man--"

She spoke without seeming to care if he heard, thinking aloud in the dusk. "Perhaps a communist truly did set off the fire in the Reichstag, though it made little sense. Perhaps there was a reason so many people were arrested that night, in Berlin alone. Perhaps there was a danger no one could see yet." Her voice caught. "But now has come the slow awakening--this will not pass. This will not stop."

She looked at him. "But it must be stopped."

On Island Life:

Mornings, the sea air stole through the open windows with the first light, hovering along the beadboard in the bathroom, upon the scrubbed linoleum on the kitchen floor, pulling the Miltons awake, the first sound that greeted them the single foghorn's note far off in the bay. And the summer days proceeded as if by sorcery. Lobsters were delivered into wooden crates tied to the dock every evening, and bacon onto the dock every morning with the milk. The Miltons woke and descended to the smell of eggs and toast, sharp coffee, and went out immediately into the sun if there was sun. They sailed. They climbed along the great rocks, found picnic spots. Swam in the cove. Knitted. Rowed across the narrow Thoroughfare to walk. And at twilight, they gathered again at the dock, or down on the rocks at the picnic grounds, and drank bourbon and vermouth, and cracked nuts. Darkness didn't fall up there, it took its time, it ceded glory to daylight, which lingered, longing to stay.

Sarah Blake not only paints a vivid portrait of each of her characters, but also of the island on which they spend their summers. I especially love the image of the trees, swaying like ship masts.

The forest path plunged away from the house, veering from the water and deeper into the woods. In here the light cataracted through the tree trunks and hanging branches, dimmed, the sharp pine mixing with the slow creak of the trees, swaying like the masts of ships they would never become. Their roots grew above the pine floor in long, thin shafts like the bones in an old lady's hand. 

The Guest Book is a multigenerational saga rich with themes of class distinctions, racial disparity, antisemitism, deep-rooted family secrets, and tradition. At nearly 500 pages in length, I couldn't put it down and was left with a sense of loss as I turned the final page. This is not one that I would enjoy on audio, given the non-linear timeline, but it's definitely one I will happily read again. It's been 13 years (coincidentally, also in January) that I reviewed Sarah Blake's marvelous World War II novel, The Postmistress. It might be time to read that one again. The Guest Book also brought to mind Anne Rivers Siddons' family saga, Colony, which I have in my re-read stack for this year. 

Highly recommend.