VANTAGE POINT, by Sara Sligar
Curses are serious business, especially if you’re unthinkably rich.
Clara and Teddy Wieland, the scions of Sara Sligar’s novel “Vantage Point,” carry theirs nobly. Previous Wielands, though flush from the family’s steel fortune, have met creatively gruesome ends: trampled in a stampede, mauled mid-cigarette by a grizzly bear, compacted into a metal beam. But none were as immediately tragic as the deaths of Clara and Teddy’s parents in a freak accident, which left the siblings orphaned as teenagers.
We meet them years later on the small island in Maine where they were raised. Teddy is elbow-deep in a Senate race he has no business winning, while Clara, in recovery from a debilitating eating disorder, tries to build an independent life beyond her brother’s protection and their family’s legacy. She’s never stopped dreading the month of April, when the Wieland curse, as it’s colloquially known, is at its most potent.
This year it takes the form of an acute, humiliating shock: A sex tape featuring an emaciated woman goes viral, and the “skeleton with a vulva” appears to be Clara. She has no memory of the encounter, but the clip “isn’t the first time it’s taken me a moment to recognize myself,” Clara admits. Not the first time, maybe, but it is the most jarring — her worst fears about herself seemingly confirmed. “She’s the thing people mistake for me.”
The Wielands know the immense power of image and perception better than anyone, having grown up in the public eye. How many grieving adolescents face paparazzi at their parents’ funerals? “The cameras could eat forever,” Clara thinks. “They could swallow you whole.”
Inevitably, more compromising materials are released, now targeting Teddy and his wife, which bolsters Clara’s suspicion that the videos are being generated by an algorithm. It’s an outré theory, and hardly anyone in her orbit is primed to believe a woman with few accomplishments considered worthy of the Wieland name. Teddy descends into cruel, self-righteous paranoia, quickly alienating his family — to say nothing of the Maine electorate — in a bid to regain control of his campaign and life. Clara, traumatized by the videos and a torrent of misogyny and threats, receives visions of her parents and relives their last moments. The book ends up a fleet, au courant Gothic thriller, complete with deepfake conspiracies and class commentary and lesbian innuendo.
This is a lot to ask of a literary plot, but the story is quite hardy: It’s been around for over 200 years.
In 1798, the American novelist Charles Brockden Brown published “Wieland; or The Transformation,” a histrionic, haunting story of a man driven mad by religious delusions. In a preface Brown suggests that his contemporaries might remember a real-life case “remarkably similar to that of Wieland.” In all likelihood he was referring to the murders by a New York farmer named James Yates of his wife and children in 1781 — at the urging, Yates claimed, of a divine voice.
Both “Wieland” and “Vantage Point” feature Clara as a narrator, observing the breakdown of her increasingly despotic and maniacal brother, whom Brown calls Theodore. As Brown’s Clara doubts her own perceptions — she must be among the earliest unreliable narrators in the American canon — Theodore is pushed to murder his family.
These days Brown’s reputation is largely confined to academic circles, though “Wieland” is generally considered one of the first American Gothic novels. Drawing on a nearly forgotten text is fair game, of course, and Sligar makes some sly updates to the original. Swapping in deepfakes for mysterious voices is a canny choice, and Sligar endows her Clara with far more power and personality than her predecessor, though I wish she’d been spared some mind-numbing lines. (“I challenge you to find any former party girl not familiar with the morning-after Scroll of Shame,” she tells the reader. “You can’t make a 30-hour-rave omelet without scrambling a few brain cells.”)
The Easter eggs are gratifying. The Wieland family boat is appropriately called the Transformation, and Cicero himself, who in Brown’s novel is listed as Theodore’s favorite author, is repurposed as the proprietor of the town’s seafood shack. Sligar studs her writing with brutally effective imagery of her own invention: Gazing at a fresh tattoo, Clara thinks the Saran Wrap covers her skin “like I was a leftover steak.”
It’s to Sligar’s credit that she recognized the eerie parallels between “Wieland” and the present day: We’ve been terrorized by external, malicious manipulations for hundreds of years, whether they take the form of an alleged spiritual authority or a string of code. Still, as her book careens to a bloody and somewhat surprising end, I was left slightly dissatisfied. Does knowing the literary ancestry of “Vantage Point” puncture its illusions? It might explain why the story’s dynamics, particularly as they relate to gender and power, occasionally feel musty. Weighing the novel’s bigger message about inheritance and fate, it’s a curious choice for an author to reconstitute centuries-old characters and consign them to the same narrative arcs generations apart.
As Clara finds time and again, particularly when she encounters hazy visitations from her dead parents, the imitation is rarely as fulfilling as the original. The most succinct judgment might come from “Wieland” itself: “Thou hast done well,” the disembodied voice tells Theodore after he begins to kill; “but all is not done.”
VANTAGE POINT | By Sara Sligar | MCDxFSG | 385 pp. | $29