Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

All of Sarah Waters' novels have historical rather than contemporary settings, and most have featured lesbians as prominent characters, but I think she is best described not as a lesbian novelist (there's something faintly diminishing about that label), or even as a historical novelist, but as a writer of literary thrillers. That this may seem an odd label is a sign of how, despite certain common settings and themes, Waters adapts her tone and style to the demands of each type of thriller: erotic (TIPPING THE VELVET), Gothic (AFFINITY and FINGERSMITH), or ghostly (THE LITTLE STRANGER). Even THE NIGHT WATCH, perhaps the least plot-driven and most "literary" of Waters' novels, attains a certain thrilling quality from its reversed narrative structure. So what type of thriller is her latest, THE PAYING GUESTS? That would be telling. At first it seems to combine elements of THE NIGHT WATCH and THE LITTLE STRANGER, though with a setting after the First World War rather than the Second. Like the Ayres family of THE LITTLE STRANGER, the Wrays face social and emotional upheaval as a result of post-war changes. But theirs is a more modest existence: the home they can no longer maintain is no grand manor but an ordinary house, one that was once full of life but now feels empty after the loss of two sons in the war, and the sudden death of the father around the same time. The latter grief revealed a series of bad investments that has stretched the family's finances to the breaking point: even with Frances Wray doing all the housework there isn't enough for her and her mother to live on. And so they make the fateful decision to rent part of the upstairs to what decorum demands they call, not lodgers, but paying guests. As that meaningless distinction might suggest, the theme of class anxiety is prominent in the novel's first pages, as the Wrays adjust to the somewhat bracing behavior of Lilian and Leonard ("Lil and Len") Barber. Waters has a keen eye for the small disturbances that inevitably follow from sharing a household with even well-behaved and likable strangers. More importantly, she understands how people do and do not conform to ideas of character type. There's a harshness to Frances from all she has lost, and a snobbishness about sharing her house with lower-class types, but she's hardly a stereotypical spinster: she has alternating impulses toward generosity and cruelty that are very true to life, and Waters gradually reveals a personal history that speaks both to Frances' personality and to the particular concerns of that historical moment. Another of Waters' rare gifts is the ability to create in readers a sense of the past, not through the layering of conventionally vivid language or of period detail, but through describing ordinary moments in which difference reveals itself by flashes. Although the narrative moves slowly in this opening section, its creation of the rhythms of daily life is so natural, so careful to avoid moments of false drama, that it never feels slow-moving. In some ways, this is the best part of the novel. Given time, of course, the plot kicks in. I won't say too much about it, although Waters' longtime readers may be able to work out some of its developments in advance, as I did. Past a certain point, there's really only one way things can go, which makes the book less exciting on narrative terms than some of Waters' others, though that may just be my impression because this type of thriller isn't one I especially enjoy. The demands of the plot also work against the subtler exploration of character and setting that had been a strength earlier on, though the ambiguities of character are not so much abandoned as submerged. As in earlier novels, Waters is interested in the way secrets, even welcome ones, force a moral and emotional coarsening, and in the line between love and infatuation. This material may feel a little familiar by now, but Waters can evoke a state of mind with such intensity that the reader begins to feel it herself. Perhaps that's why, despite finding the turns of the plot underwhelming in places, I read the book almost continuously from the moment I received it to the moment I turned the final page. That final page avoids what had seemed a last predictable plot twist in favor of something I had been hoping for but hadn't believed Waters would dare to do. The ending of THE PAYING GUESTS captures the great virtue of Waters' novels: her ability to combine the narrative matter of the thriller with a psychological realism that makes these books more than just page-turners. Frances Wray may be caught up in an entirely conventional sequence of terrible events, but her mindset, and her times, are less conventional, and will offer even readers who share my limited enthusiasm for this subgenre much to enjoy. And those who love that subgenre will find that this is what Sarah Waters always offers: one of the best thrillers of the year.