“These Ghosts are Family”

By Maisy Card

(Simon & Schuster, 271 pp, $26)

The beauty of having a book review column is that it spurs me to read more eclectically than I usually would. Over the years, I have reviewed books about physics and math, subjects I never voluntarily read.

Years later, though, I don’t recall much from them, except a false sense of virtue for tackling the topics. Left to my own devices, I rarely reject an intergenerational novel. Besides the most famous, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, there’s another I consider perfect.

While many know Isaac Bashevis Singer, fewer realize he had a brother who may have been even better. Israel Bashevis Singer wrote “The Brothers Ashkenazi,” a masterpiece. For me to put Isaac second is enormous. He touched me so deeply that my son is named after him. Yet not since reading Israel’s sweeping novel have I felt this strongly about a family saga.

Maisy Card has written a spectacular intergenerational novel.

Card, a Rutgers University graduate, librarian at Newark Public Library and a Newark resident, has written a textured story set in colonial Jamaica that also takes readers to Harlem and Brooklyn 2020.

She’s such a lyrical writer that I found myself re-reading paragraphs for the sheer pleasure of letting her words wash over me. Here is her opening paragraph:

“Let’s say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death. Though you have never used those words to describe what you did. At the time you’d thought of it as seizing an opportunity placed before you by God, but since your wife, Adele, died a month ago, you’ve convinced yourself her heart attack was retribution for your sin. So today you have gathered three of your female descendants in one house, even the daughter who has thought you dead all these years, and decided that you will finally tell them the truth: you are not who you say you are.”

And so begins a magnificent story, a family saga in which racism is threaded into its tapestry, ghosts live among us, and somehow, each person in this family tree is relatable. That alone is a feat because feeling sympatico with a junkie or an opportunist isn’t always a natural fit.

These Ghosts Are Family

Smartly opening with a family tree, which comes in handy, the novel explains how the branches connect. Card lays out generations and how one man is pivotal. Since readers learn early on Stan is reckoning with his life, this book must take readers back to Jamaica, where his story begins.

Of course, his story cannot simply start with him. In this case, a chunk of the past comes last, and it’s an interesting choice that brings together the branches beautifully.

Card’s brief journal entries of a slaveowner, allowing him to show himself as the malignant creature he is, are compelling. It’s a rare book that would take us inside his mind, and it’s not a place anyone wants to dwell long. His leather journal, passed along in the family as a secret heirloom, is so powerful that when a descendant reads it two centuries later, she is properly distressed.

Writing about beliefs, from ghosts to the devil, and any form of worship can come off as bombastic, superficial. Here, though, mentions of duppy (ill-intentioned spirits) feel as if they could be haunting the hilly terrain of Jamaica. Card gracefully flits between the stories about beliefs in other dimensions as effortlessly as she does the centuries and the places. Readers get a feel for a Harlem brownstone of today and rural Jamaica of 1832, which is where a white man finds himself on a chain gang.

Beaten to a pulp and left to die, two young women rescue him. When revived, he tries to explain how he came to such a miserable circumstance.

“Somehow, with his single reptilian eye, he managed to look at us with amusement and mockery, and I supposed it was how he looked upon the whole world,” Card writes.

This man, as every character, plays a vital part in the family saga. With so many characters, it takes the hand of a gifted writer to bring it in at a tidy 271 pages. I would greedily have read more, for this tale mixing history and folklore earns a place in the canon of magnificent intergenerational novels.