Alena

October 28, 2013
Hitchcockian suspense infiltrates the cloistered contemporary art scene in Pastan’s (Lady of the Snakes) riveting third novel. On her first trip to the Venice Biennale, the unnamed narrator, a naïve young curator, is taken under the wing of a wealthy, well-bred man named Bernard Augustin, who offers her the job of a lifetime at the Nauquasset, his jewel-box museum on Cape Cod, Mass. She seizes the opportunity, but not without some hesitation: all she knows about “the Nauk,” as it’s called, is that its previous curator, an enigmatic Russian beauty named Alena, disappeared two years ago under mysterious circumstances, and that her disappearance broke Bernard’s heart. Like the heroine of du Maurier’s Rebecca, Pastan’s unnamed protagonist finds herself competing futilely with a ghost. But Pastan refreshes the formula with a new soundtrack: the relentless, haunting roar of the sea—the perfect embodiment of the way Alena’s name echoes throughout the offices and galleries of the Nauk. Upon glimpsing the Atlantic, she says of it: “A pause, and then the beast drew another breath. A restless, endless, living sound. For a moment, as it filled my ears with its slow panting, I knew I had made a terrible mistake.” Flush with erotic intrigues and insights into real, working artists, Pastan has written a smart, chilling thriller that leaves readers thoroughly spooked.

November 1, 2013
This gentle homage to du Maurier's Rebecca teleports the story from a gloomy English mansion to an avant-garde Cape Cod art gallery. Pastan's first-person narrator (as in Rebecca, never named) is a young, penniless art history graduate from the Midwest. In Venice, where she is serving as factotum to overbearing art maven Louise, the narrator meets wealthy Bernard Augustin, who owns a storied gallery called Nauquasset on Cape Cod. As in Rebecca, the narrator escapes her thankless job by following Bernard home but as his new head curator, not his wife. (Bernard is gay.) Once at Nauquasset, the narrator finds she has some capacious shoes to fill: Bernard's best friend and former curator, Alena, disappeared one night while swimming, but the entire gallery staff seems to be still in her thrall. Like the passive aggressive servants at du Maurier's Manderley, headed by the forbidding Mrs. Danvers, Nauquasset's team undermines their new boss at every turn, and Mrs. Danvers' doppelganger, Agnes the bookkeeper, treats her with undisguised contempt. Bernard is mostly absent on various business trips as the narrator struggles to establish her authority by launching a new show of shell sculptures by aptly named Cape Cod artist Celia Cowry. Here, she commits her first error: Not only were Bernard and his employees rooting for a transgressive installation by a wounded Gulf War vet, but Celia, at first grateful to be recognized after years of obscurity, is proving to be impossibly high-maintenance. Love interest is provided by hard-bitten local police chief Chris Passoa, who is investigating Alena's disappearance. Although offering a wry, perceptive commentary on the contemporary art world, the novel lacks the creeping sense of dread pervading du Maurier's classic. Nor does the narrator's relationship with Bernard raise the dramatic stakes, not merely due to the fact that a curatorship is inherently less fraught than a marriage, but since Bernard, after launching the action, disappears from it almost as completely as Alena herself. However, unlike Alena, Bernard, when gone, is easily forgotten. A technically able but rather tepid reimagining of the gothic staple Rebecca.

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December 15, 2013
Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again. Fans of Daphne du Maurier's timeless Rebecca will revel in this contemporary homage to her gothic masterpiece. Though updating the charactersthe Max de Winter stand-in is gay; and the modern Mrs. Danvers, a business managerand the setting, the narrative's excruciating tension hovering beneath the surface remains the same. When the unnamed narrator, a naive young art historian and lowly museum assistant, is offered a position as the curator of a trendy Cape Cod museum, she jumps at the chance. However, all is not as golden as it initially seems at the Nauquasset (the Nauk). Bernard Augustin, the museum's brooding owner, and the rest of the employees seem to be mired in the past, as the memory of Alena, the previous curator, who vanished more than two years ago, still holds sway over the Nauk and its staff. Trying to exert her own authority and creative vision amid an ongoing investigation into Alena's mysterious disappearance, she is thwarted at every turn by the phantom presence of her predecessor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)