I should make a disclosure before I review Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, which is that I’m an identical twin. I didn’t have anything to disclose with her previous novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, because even after numerous attempts I have not yet successfully traveled in time. But Her Fearful Symmetry (Scribner; 406 pages) is about a pair of identical twins, Julia and Valentina, whose mother and aunt, Edwina and Elspeth, are also identical twins.
Novelists love twins–evil twins, vanishing twins, incestuous twins, conjoined twins, spooky dead-little-girl twins. We make handy symbols for any writer who feels inclined to muse on the nature of human identity, which is basically every writer ever. But twins aren’t symbols; they’re people. There are not, to my knowledge, any great identical-twin novelists (though I think John Barth has a twin sister), and I have never yet read a fictional account of twinness that I found convincing, with one exception: Darin Strauss’s excellent Chang and Eng, about Barnum & Bailey’s famous Siamese twins. As Elspeth tells her lover Robert shortly before she dies, “You haven’t got a twin, so you can’t know how it is.” Too right.
Niffenegger is not, as far as I can ascertain, a twin, but she is a consummate pro, and she gives it a solid try. Edwina and Elspeth–the mom and the aunt–are estranged from each other, and when Elspeth dies, she leaves her apartment, which overlooks Highgate Cemetery in London, to her twin nieces Julia and Valentina, on the condition that they spend a year living there. Julia and Valentina are 20 years old, ash blond, pretty and skinny. They’re bright, aimless, dreamy college dropouts who live at home. They don’t have jobs. They’re virgins. At night they snuggle together in the same bed. One has a powerful urge to knock their identical ash blond heads together.
Julia and Valentina flit off to London to their luxurious new apartment–which turns out to be haunted by Elspeth, who is perplexed to discover that she has become a ghost. “What am I supposed to be learning from the spiritual equivalent of house arrest?” she wonders. “Is this an oversight on the part of the celestial authorities?” She can’t leave the apartment, though she can, with great effort, nudge physical objects. (Thus vindicating the “noetic science” of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.)
Gradually, differences arise between the once inseparable Julia and Valentina. In the land of perfect oneness, asymmetries are afoot. Valentina wants to go out into the world and be a fashion designer. She feels trapped and smothered by their twinnish dyad. Julia wants to keep things as they are and feels betrayed by Valentina’s growing independence. The distracting presences of Elspeth (whom only Valentina can see) and two attractive male neighbors push the girls further off balance. They can’t stay together, and they can’t separate. Something will have to give.
But what? And how much will we care when it does? Niffenegger is an extraordinarily sensitive and accomplished writer, and Her Fearful Symmetry is a work of lovely delicacy. With its gravestones and ghosts and pallid, hollow-eyed waifs, it’s pure goth porn. At times, it’s more. When the lonely phantom Elspeth, longing for solidity, snuggles her ectoplasmic self into a little desk drawer for comfort, it’s so viscerally convincing, you wonder how a corporeal being could ever have imagined it.
But Her Fearful Symmetry is not a book of great emotional force, not the way Time Traveler’s Wife was. It’s marred by a wrenching plot twist that, to me, sails way beyond the bounds of plausibility. And there’s ultimately something strangely toylike about the little world of Her Fearful Symmetry. Everything in it–the apartment, the cemetery, the two sets of twins, the crossword-composing, obsessive-compulsive classicist upstairs–is fashioned with such twiddly bespoke neatness, such fussy perfection, that the whole affair is like a tragedy performed by exquisite dolls: lovely and precious and lifeless. Only the spectral Elspeth feels real. And what does it say about a novel that the one character who feels alive is a ghost?
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Donald Trump Is TIME's 2024 Person of the Year
- TIME’s Top 10 Photos of 2024
- Why Gen Z Is Drinking Less
- The Best Movies About Cooking
- Why Is Anxiety Worse at Night?
- A Head-to-Toe Guide to Treating Dry Skin
- Why Street Cats Are Taking Over Urban Neighborhoods
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com