Title: Catherine House Author: Elisabeth Thomas
Published: May 12, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 320
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world’s best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years—summers included—completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises its graduates a future of sublime power and prestige, and that they can become anything or anyone they desire.
Among this year’s incoming class is Ines, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, pills, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline—only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. The school’s enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves and their place within the formidable black iron gates of Catherine.
For Ines, Catherine is the closest thing to a home she’s ever had, and her serious, timid roommate, Baby, soon becomes an unlikely friend. Yet the House’s strange protocols make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when Baby’s obsessive desire for acceptance ends in tragedy, Ines begins to suspect that the school—in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence—might be hiding a dangerous agenda that is connected to a secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.
Catherine House, a recipe: take one part The Secret History and fold in essence of The Haunting of Hill House. Season liberally with Frankenstein. Once mixed, preheat oven to “stream of consciousness” and bake for 3 hours. Serve with a side of vague unease.
Elisabeth Thomas’s debut novel is a Gothic in the style of Donna Tartt. (Honestly, though: any book about hedonistic, amoral college students is getting compared to Tartt and there’s no way to avoid it.) For what it was, Catherine House is good. The atmosphere is creepy, the secrets going on behind the scenes are juicy, and the story itself is organized in a way that maximizes the suspense and intrigue. I liked it.
At the same time, curious minds will inquire: what the fuck is actually going on at Catherine? The author never explicitly tells us. The book skirts neatly around confronting issues head-on, and while this adds to the “mystery,” at times it also felt like it was Thomas avoiding having to flesh out her story. While I understand the intent behind keeping everything hazy and dreamlike, it seems to me that when everything is vague, the story loses impact. The book is not grounded in the real because it deals too much with uncertainties and shadows. There should have been balance.
This is very much a book that thrives off the energy of its setting. Looking back, you realize not much happened during the 300+ pages of story. Yet at no point did I lose interest or feel that the lack of action was detrimental to my enjoyment. From the very first page, the lush, moody House invited me in and kept me a hostage, in much the same way that Ines, the main character, is seduced by Catherine House. I found that it didn’t matter so much that nearly 50% of the narrative is spent describing the weird food Ines eats or the odd classes she takes. It didn’t matter, because always, at the edges, was the looming feeling of Wrongness. We know, and Ines knows, that there’s more going on than eccentric teaching styles and a crumbling mansion. We don’t know what it is, but we suspect it has something to do with “plasm,” a material that scientists based out of Catherine discovered and became infamous for experimenting with.
But the book ends without fully delving into the mystery. What is plasm? What are the professors at Catherine House really up to? Is it brainwashing, or is it something paranormal? Does Ines succumb to the House’s fever dream, or does she escape? And what, for god’s sake, happened to Ines that was so terrible she decided to apply to Catherine in the first place?
Catherine House does not answer these questions, and I believe it should have. I don’t want everything spelled out for me in black and white, but spending an entire book immersed in a murky world of amorphous menace without ever getting a single clear answer felt, as I said, like the author herself didn’t understand the truth of Catherine House. There should have been some sort of climax or confrontation, one where the reader’s investment cashed in. Yet there was none. In the end, the school continues unchanged, with the majority of its secrets still unknown and undetected.
I should also add that Thomas probably would have been more successful with this book if there were emotional payoffs (as opposed to fact-finding, plot-related rewards). The jacket copy of Catherine House references the death of Ines’s roommate as if it is a sort of catalyst for the plot. That is not the case. Baby dies within the first third of the text, and any emotionality derived from that event is very subdued. The greater delirium of the school itself supersedes any other feelings. Amid the whirl of exhausting studying, drunkenness, and manic sex, Baby’s death never feels as important as it was meant to be. I think that if the author had been able to give Ines more of a depth of feeling about this (and other things as well), then the story would have been more satisfying. But even though Ines likes to think herself different, at the end of the day, she’s just as consumed by the same sinister ecstasy for the school as everyone else is.
What is Catherine House? Does it accomplish what it sets out to do? I’m unsure. I give Thomas full points for setting and atmosphere and premise. The exposition and rising action of the book are engrossing, but there seems to be little reward for patient readers when the finale comes around. I would have loved this book if it had been ever so slightly more clear-headed. Still, it was a weird, unique book that I enjoyed reading.
