The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
Review of The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
“We go to sleep listening to the flicker of the fire, the occasional thud of wood, chunks falling into the embers. Outside, in the winter moonlight, the world is cold—stark—a bare echo of the place where, for me, life begins and ends.”
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller (2021). Published by Riverhead Books.
I stumbled on this book in the new section of Barnes and Nobles. Naturally, I was drawn in by the cover and the premise, but, to be quite frank, I couldn’t actually afford the book. Whenever I go to a store like Barnes and Nobles, I take a picture of the cover of the book and then wait to find it in the library. I wish I could afford new books, but, alas, being both broke and a little lost on the path of life tends to restrict your budget pretty hard.
I was extremely unprepared for the graphic descriptions of sexual assault and rape in this book; I wanted to start the very beginning of this review off with that. What makes this worse is that often these are cases of incest, which adds to the factor of disgust, I, and hopefully many other readers, were probably feeling as we read through these scenes.
Anyways, now that I’ve gotten the hard stuff out of the way, let’s dive into this review.
Content
The format of this book is very unique in the way that the actual present day event, the day in which Eleanor, our main character, cheats on her husband (whom she has three kids with) to have sex with her childhood friend Jonas, who she originally met when she was like fourteen or thirteen. We then have this single day interwoven with the series of events in Eleanor’s life that has led her to this moment, all the way up from her parent’s divorce when she and her sister were children to the moving in of her stepbrother, Conrad, who ultimately ends up sexually assaulting her every single night as she pretends to sleep. I don’t think our main character’s actions are really justified in where she ends up sleeping with the guy she grew up with in the woods of Massachusetts,
I found this novel to be very interesting as a representation of class and race. We get the hints of family struggles with money somewhere in the distant past, which led to her grandmother taking her mother and uncle to Guatemala because it was cheaper, but then in the present day our main character has a PhD in comparative literature, grew up in NYC being able to go to events based in the arts (which screams a certain kind of privilege), and married a rich British financial journalist. The community her family goes to in Massachusetts screams rich white people from the descriptions alone, and there is a glaring lack of diversity in this novel outside of the fact that Eleanor’s family goes and eats dim sum in Chinatown every New Year’s Day. But even the dim sun is described in a way that makes it seem invasive and unwanted, which came off strange to me as the only cultural artifact of nonwhite culture in the novel.
The Paper Palace is an escape for Eleanor, until it isn’t when her invasive stepbrother begins coming into her room and jacking off to her—I won’t go deeper, but it gets worse from here. As we juxtapose the present day, where both Jonas and Eleanor are married to other people with kids (in Eleanor’s case), we discover how they met in the woods and continued to build their relationship. Until one day, after a certain tragedy, Jonas doesn’t come back in the summers. They meet again in a random diner in NYC, as Jonas is an art student at Cooper Union and Eleanor grew up in NYC, so naturally she’s there. And that starts the entire doomed dynamic all over again.
A key thing I found interesting was the family dynamics and trauma being repeated over and over again in a way that was blatantly obvious. Eleanor’s father keeps getting together and marrying women who are massively controlling, guiding him away from seeing his children despite it’s what he wants to do. Her mother chases after a man with a broken son, and once he leaves her, she, too, is left broken. Her own mother was the same way, divorced multiple times before living out her final days abroad. Jonas and Peter are parallels to each other: one is British and a writer, another an American painter and gallery owner. This just shows that they are foils, meant to be two sides of the same coin that Eleanor must flip. Both have mothers that don’t like Elle, both are seemingly wealthy considering their circumstances.
This was a well-structured and well-written novel, I found the writing to be quite engaging. Although I didn’t enjoy the story as much as I thought I would, I still kept reading. In other cases I would’ve dropped the novel like a hotcake, but I kept going until the very end. I didn’t agree with the main character, and while I could understand how her trauma informed her life, I don’t think her decisions were worth risking all the stability and love she had created with Peter and their three children. She’s just repeating her toxic family dynamics in a way that isn’t healthy. The characters also felt like pseudo-intellectual NYC types. Met a lot of these type of people personally, so it struck a chord in me.
Overall Thoughts
It’s not a bad book, but I definitely think it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It gets a little too graphic on describing sexual assault, which can be majorly triggering for some people. This is a very debatable book in the way that it has an open-ending, although some people might think it’s definitely Jonas she chose at the end of the day, but also because it’s questionable if she made the right decisions. She saw how divorce and remarriage impacted her own life, which should be a major warning sign to her. The book really sucks you in too, which is a demonstration in good writing because even if you don’t agree with the narrator, you still keep reading. Give it a shot if any of this sounds interesting to you.
