Review: Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger

As a huge fan of The Time Traveller's Wife, I have been waiting with bated breath for Audrey Niffenegger's second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. I particularly was looking forward to another carefully crafted literary maze; TTW was a beautiful catacomb of human relationships. I put my name on the waiting list at the local library as soon as I knew the release date, and was the first to receive a copy.

I'm not going to drag this out: I am disappointed. I think part of the problem is that Niffenegger set the bar very high with her first book, and having such an achievement as a first novel is difficult to match with the second.

In Symmetry, Niffenegger again creates a reality where the division of various realms is more of a porous membrane rather than a wall. The novel opens with the sad, early death of Elspeth, a forty-something year old woman, from leukemia. She leaves her husband, Robert, who works at a historic cemetary near their home, all of her personal effects, but wills the twenty year-old twin daughters of her own estranged twin sister the deed to the flat downstairs, given that they live in it for a year before selling it. The twins arrive a year later, carrying a great deal of baggage both inside and out, to a seemingly empty apartment, but of course, it is not empty; Elspeth is still there, unable to leave, but growing stronger by the day. As her ability to communicate with the living increases, so intensifies the strange relationship brewing between the girls, Robert, and Elspeth until a horrific turn of events forces each to reconcile their own desires with what it means to be human.

I can boil my disappointment down to a few points. First, I knew exactly what the Big Secret was within a few chapters. Second, the relationship between the girls as well as that between the two of them and Robert had an almost V.C. Andrews feel to it which I found mildly disgusting. Third, it was just typical and predictable. By the time The Secret comes out, the ending is inevitable. If I hadn't known she was capable of more, I might have been satisfied despite these things, but I do, and she is, and I'm not. I especially felt that the ending could have been better.

WARNING ** PLOT GIVEAWAY ** SKIP TO BELOW IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT YET!
After everything that had happened, Robert left Elspeth/Edie with the baby?! After she'd already abandoned her own babies, allowed one to kill herself, and then not helped her come back to life, she used her reanimated daughter's body to have a baby with her husband, and he left it with her when he took off? Yuck.

OK, YOU CAN COME BACK NOW************

Hopefully, Niffenegger's third novel will return to a more positive, expansive plot rather than a rehashing of family-ghost-with-a-secret tales. Her writing style is still lovely, but the material was lacking in this one.

Rating: two out of five stars: Creepy, and not in a good way.