The Ghost Notebooks: A Novel

"A well-crafted ghost story… Genuinely surprising… Dolnick’s ambitions go beyond run-of-the-mill thrills and chills… [He] serves up a more nuanced account of the couple’s unraveling, leaving us to wonder if their problems are the work of malevolent spiritual forces or a complicated psychological meltdown." —John Searles, The New York Times Book Review "What urban couple wouldn’t want to trade the din of the Q train for the sound of crickets, exchange a cramped apartment for a spacious old building steeped in history, only a few hours’ drive from downtown Manhattan? Think again. Ben Dolnick’s elegant, eerie new novel suggests it might be better to stay in Queens… Dolnick excels at creating a subtle, growing sense of unease… The greater mystery unveiled in this powerful novel lies not in spooky atmospherics, but our own failure to connect with those closest to us." —Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post "Looking for another provocative porthole to the past? Tryxa0Ben Dolnick’s fourth novel, The Ghost Notebooks. The plot provides a durable framework for Mr. Dolnick’s keen eye for detail and his penetrating ear for dialogue." — Sam Roberts, The New York Times "A missing fiancée and a haunted house in the Hudson Valley are at the enigmatic center of Ben Dolnick’s The Ghost Notebooks, but the real mystery is how well we know those closest to us." — Vogue "An insightful look at our visions and revisions as we grapple with love and grief… You’ll also likely laugh. A lot." —Cory Oldweiler, AM New York "A ghost story, a mystery, and a love story in one." —Elizabeth Entenman, Hello Giggles "Dolnick’s most thematically ambitious work… He has a gift for metaphor, a way of expressing complex emotions and relationships with a pithy comparison that’s easy to understand but genuinely illuminating, and at the same time isn’t a cliché and never feels cutesy… Over a series of short, quietly powerful novels, Dolnick has emerged as an author of compulsive readability and real insights." — Ryan Vlastelica, The A.V. Club "For all its curiosity about things that go bump in the night, the most notable features in The Ghost Notebooks are its qualities of light. Ben Dolnick’s charm, lucidity, and insight will come as no surprise to his growing band of fans. Count me one of them." —Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire "In this compelling mix of love story, detective story, and ghost story, [Dolnick] takes a haunting look at what might follow life." —Michele Leber, Booklist "Hannah loses her job and applies to be live-in caretaker of the Wright Historic House upstate. She and her fiancé Nick leave Astoria with dreams of a simpler, reinvigorated relationship. And then Hannah disappears. This Brooklyn author delivers an affecting and original take on love, loss,xa0and grief in assured writing that is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes in the same sentence." —Cory Oldweiler, AM New York's "Must-Read Books in 2018" "According to [Emma Roberts], the unique novel is ‘a supernatural story of love, ghosts, and madness as a young couple, newly engaged, become caretakers of a historic museum.’ I don't know about you, but that sounds like a book I just can't pass up." —Sadie Trombetta, Bustle, "5 Books Recommended by Celebrities & Their Book Clubs in March 2018" "[ The Ghost Notebooks ] treads slightly into the supernatural… Perceptive and witty… Passages from various diaries and written materials from the museum are interspersed with more standard chapters that are narrated in first-person by Nick, telling the story of this time in his life to an unidentified person at some point in the future. Dolnick’s facility with description and scene-setting is enviable. He manages to get in all the sights and sounds a reader needs to feel in the moment." —Jennifer Levin, The Santa Fe New Mexican BEN DOLNICK is the author of the novels At the Bottom of Everything, You Know Who You Are, and Zoology. His work has appeared in GQ and The New York Times, and on NPR . He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and with his wife and daughter. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. A component of our trouble—the thing that had taken our disxadcontent from the back burner and poured it directly onto our laps—was that Hannah had, a few months earlier, been laid off.xa0It happened in winter, during an ice storm on a Friday afternoon: she called me crying from the break room and my first thought was that one of her parents had died. Is everything okay? No, she said, she was getting paid off. Paid off? Bribed? Not paid off, you fucking idiot, laid off! Laid off! Fired!xa0For two years she’d been working at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, standing an hour a day on the Q, eating eleven-dollar salads on Columbus Avenue for lunch. She’d been in their exhibit research department, writing signs and brochures and scripts for the guides to recite while they led tourists through exhibits about New York’s ports and Abraham Lincoln. America’s most popular president, he is commonly associated with Illinois, where he made his mark as a lawyer, or Kentucky, where he was famously raised in a log cabin. Lesser known is the significant role that New York played in Lincoln’s adult life. “This budget has just been a disaster for us,” her boss explained; they were sitting in exactly the same positions as when he’d interviewed her. “I wish there were something we could do.”xa0We were lucky enough—i.e., we still had enough money from my job and our savings and our families—that Hannah being laid off was not an imminent practical disaster: we would, for a while anyway, be able to pay the rent, and buy groceries without scrutinizing per-unit prices, and keep our gym memxadberships. But practical disasters, it turns out, aren’t the only kinds of disasters. In the weeks and months afterward I came to understand, in a way I hadn’t really when my acquaintance with people losing their jobs had been mostly via CNN headlines and Raymond Carver stories, why being laid off—even laid off from a job you’ve enjoyed, as opposed to needed—was always high on the list of stressful things that could happen to a perxadson, and to a relationship. All of our tensions seemed now to have been dipped in a horrible radioactive juice; some nights I’d wake up at three in the morning with my legs sweating only to discover that Hannah was awake and sweating too—we were tangled together like sheets of damp saran wrap.The first visible outgrowth of her being laid off was that she decided we should move (she spent a great deal of each day demonstrating, via job sites, that the only jobs available in her field happened to be outside the five boroughs). Whether to move was, we both understood, a proxy war over whether to get married. This meant that every job offer she came across led to a tense, desolate conversation about something like the housing market in Philadelphia or the lack of public transit in Atlanta. Many nights, as we sat eating dinner, lifting our forks to our faces with the blank, weary expressions of refugees, I had the feeling that we were actors in a play: The End of Love, now appearing at the Flea, acted with torturous realism by newcomxaders Hannah Rampe and Nick Beron.xa0I was working then, and had been for the last few years, as an assistant music editor. This meant editing music for movies, mostly mid-budget dramas that I would never have gone to see if I hadn’t had anything to do with them. I was the assistant to a thin, bedraggled man named Jeremy who did all the actual creative work—the composing and the arranging and the watching and rewatching of the same eleven-second scene, trying to decide whether the emotional tenor of the moment called for an oboe or a muted trumpet. My contribution was more technical than musical; all day I sat in a semi-darkened room in Midtown, wearing expensive headphones, staring at a thirty-inch monixadtor, adjusting sliders by increments too small to see. My dreams often involved Pro Tools mixing boards, jagged multicolored graphs of sound files. xa0I’d come to editing as a concession—my plan had been (just as Jeremy’s plan had been) to become a famous, or anyway a renowned, musician. xa0When I met Hannah I was just at the tail end of the period in which I believed this might actually happen. I’d made the reguxadlar station stops: a band that played talent shows in my Maryxadland high school, a series of tremblingly self-serious demos recorded on an eight-track, a biweekly appointment at the bar in Ann Arbor that paid in drink tickets. I played guitar and bass and piano and wrote songs that my dad, in a reflective mood, once said reminded him of the Cars. xa0And when I was a couple of years out of Michigan, I put out an album. This seemed, briefly, to be the success that I’d been dreaming of since I was twelve—a record label (now defunct) gave me actual money, I had an album release party, I went on a slightly depressing tour during which I put an incredible number of miles on my Camry. My mom, who’d never quite given up the idea that I should go to business school, sent me a congratulatory bouquet of balloons. Notices were somewhere between respectful and tautological (“Nick Beron’s Pushing Off is a first album by a new singer-songwriter”). An online music magazine I’d only vaguely heard of named me one of that fall’s artists to watch. xa0It’s hard to say exactly when I decided this wasn’t for me. Some of it was the money. And some of it was that I think I’d believed, without ever quite articulating it to myself, that to release an album was to ascend to a celestial plane from which you only returned in order to play sold- out shows at Radio City and to grant enigmatic interviews to Rolling Stone. That you could have an album out and still need to live with four room-mates in Long Island City, that my life for the foreseeable future was going to consist of opening for friends’ bands and sending out mass email reminders and playing shows for three people in the back rooms of Czech restaurants . . . I peered down the road and I balked. And music editing didn’t feel entirely like a self- betrayal (although my dad, that year for my birthday, got me axa0 T-shirt with the word “sellout” printed across the chest). I was making decent money, I was using my musical abilities, I was occasionally attending premieres where people like Susan Sarandon and Jeff Garlin would waft thanks in my general direction. It was, of course, painful to see how little the world mourned the loss of Nick Beron the musician— there were no puzzled queries from disappointed fans, no pleas from record executives— but I was, occasional midnight pangs excepted, doing fine. Just as the function of most furniture is to fill up a room, the function of most jobs is to fill up a life. By the time I met Hannah it had been a year since I’d last played a show, and I was just becoming practiced at describing myself, with just the right mix of irony and self- deprecation, as a “failed musician.” I was twenty- six, with a beard I liked to scratch in moments of intense self- involvement, and round metal glasses whose lenses were perpetually in need of cleaning. I tended, a few minutes into any conversation, to find a way to mention the stars of whatever movie I happened to be working on, always in a tone that suggested that I wasn’t entirely sure who they were. “That must have been really tough,” she said. xa0“Which part?” xa0“Well, you said you always wanted to play music. So decidxading to go into editing must have felt, I don’t know, like you were giving up on yourself, maybe. Is that bad to say?” xa0We had, I want to emphasize, met approximately twenty minutes before this conversation. I’d delivered versions of my music-industry spiel to at least a dozen people, and she was the first one who’d greeted it with anything other than nods of appreciation. xa0This was in the apartment of another assistant music editor, named Marisa. She’d invited a dozen people over for dinner to see her new place in Crown Heights (white-painted brick walls, sticky floors), and one of them happened to be Hannah, who she’d known at Oberlin. The rest of the guests were musixadcians, art teachers, personal assistants, one loud-voiced man who made sure that everyone knew he was just briefly touchxading down between stints in Berlin. This party was in January, so there was an air of picturesqueness: soap-flake snow falling outside, everyone in chunky sweaters. xa0When Hannah and I told the story of our meeting, we always stopped it at that first conversation about music—I’d given an obnoxious speech, she’d insulted me, and the rest was history. But I don’t think I really took her in until later. xa0After dinner—we ate spaghetti with capers at a long table that was really a woodworking bench—an activity developed of people trying to light Italian cookie wrappers on fire. The girl who’d brought them said that if you rolled them into a tube and lit them, they’d float up to the ceiling. Hannah was sitting next to me, and we fumbled together with the lighter and the paper, laughing and correcting each other in the way of high school lab partners. She was tall (even sitting down you could tell) with a long neck, dark hair piled on top of her head, draxadmatic facial angles. Somehow most of her personality was concentrated in her eyebrows and mouth; her default expression conveyed a readiness to find something hilarious or ridiculous. “These things,” she said, watching me fumble with the lighter, “are going to blow like Apollo 13.”xa0“Apollo 13 didn’t blow up. It reentered safely. That’s why they made a movie about it.”xa0“Good to know,” she said. (She was highly attuned to the male blowhard, as a species, for reasons that became obvious as soon as I met her father.) She took the lighter from me and leaned over the table to light hers. We sat back. And while the cookie wrappers up and down the table rose in weightless silent majesty, ours tipped together on their sides and smoldered. Read more