The Guest Book by Sarah Blake

I love Sarah Blake’s new novel, The Guest Book. It is an engaging and sweeping story about three generations of a New York WASP family struggling with changing social mores and a diminishing fortune. The novel explores how the secrets of one generation can permanently alter the dynamics of the next generation, even if current family members don’t quite understand why.  The story’s vivid characters illustrate how WASP culture maintains power by perpetuating racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. Blake’s appreciation of history, both personal and societal, permeates the book. The themes of the novel are provocative, the characters well developed and the dialogue rings true. 

In1935, Ogden and Kitty Milton have everything they want: each other, plenty of money, status in Manhattan society and three beautiful children. Ogden’s traces his lineage back to the Mayflower, and like the Milton men before him, he graduated from Harvard. He runs a successful Wall Street investment firm started by his father. When Kitty and Ogden’s 5-year-old son Neddy falls from a window and dies, Kitty is devastated.  Ogden and Kitty don’t speak of Neddy’s death to each other or their surviving children. In true WASP fashion, Ogden’s mother counsels, “Somethings are better off left unsaid.” To help “Kitty snap out of it,” Ogden buys an island off the coast of Maine. (WHAT?!) Each summer, this island becomes the emotional epicenter for the three remaining Milton offspring and eventually their collective five children. While on the island, Kitty reminds her family that “good manners are the foundation of civilization and noise is for the poorly bred.”

In the present, Kitty and Ogden and their progeny are deceased, their fortune spent. The five grandchildren, who are in their 50s, must decide the fate of the family’s island. For Evie, one of the granddaughters, the island cannot be sold as it holds the family’s history and identity. Decade after decade, the family still gathers each summer. Time seems to standstill. “Nothing will ever change. Sunlight. Starlight. Drinks on the dock. A single-sail outing in the bay. It will never change. You will not die. On and On. Like a painting. As long as the island stands, we stand.” And yet just three generations later, Kitty and Ogden’s grandchildren are wrestling with the implication of their grandparents’ depleted fortune.

Willful ignorance is a theme of the novel. At some level, the Milton family never questioned the source of Ogden Milton’s fortune. Years later Evie’s husband discovers Ogden profited from a Nazi affiliated company.  More systemic is Kitty and Ogden’s racism, anti-Semitism and myopic perception of the world.  Their son Moss knows that the end of WWII is bringing social change and greater inclusion. When he invites his Jewish friend Len Levy and his black friend Reg Pauling to the island, Kitty and Ogden warmly welcome them.  Pleasant conversation and genial banter ensue. Though both these men are Harvard graduates, Kitty and Ogden view them as interlopers who can never be a part of the elite establishment. WASPS should be in power. People from other tribes should be guests. The Miltons want to believe the sole reason for their financial success is that Ogden works hard, rather than acknowledging the economic system advances WASPS while excludes others. 

Another theme of the novel is how WASP culture values secrecy. The five grandchildren know almost nothing about the climactic night on the island when their Uncle Moss died.  Evie says, “No one really talks about Uncle Moss. He was a little tragic, I think. He played the piano.” It is jarring how little his nieces and nephews know of their gregarious, kind and complicated uncle whose life dominated one generation of Miltons.

Kitty and Ogden hoped their island would permanently remain in the Milton family as a counterforce to the simple truth of human existence, “we vanish.” It is unclear what will happen. I wish the novel’s ending offered greater resolution about all the characters. But maybe that is Blake’s point. The older generation of Miltons took many secrets to the grave. It is up to the younger generation to sort through the detritus of their complicated family legacy and understand the implications for their lives.