The House on Buzzard's Bay

For his third book, The House on Buzzard’s Bay, Dwyer Murphy taps into a vibe of uneasiness not quite like the moods he established in his previous two novels. He gets away from the casually noirish vibe of An Honest Living and the heist mechanics of The Stolen Coast to tell a story thick with suspense but also rife with ambiguity. In a quite enjoyable way, this is a novel hard to categorize. It is partly a mystery and partly a tale about a group of friends just entering middle-age and starting to feel the full weight of adult responsibility. It may even partly be a ghost story. The novel sticks to one locale, a small town in summer “on the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, on Buzzard’s Bay,” but it positively brims with atmosphere. Murphy grew up in this area, and his familiarity with it makes for some of his best descriptive writing yet. As you read and the tensions among the characters mount, you can feel the breezes off the channels and ponds and smell the salt in the air. You can see the sunsets and the ever-present ospreys flying around. You feel like an intimate to these people staying in the narrator’s large, vacation house, and you become as unsettled as they do as a series of odd events unfolds.

The narrator and his four friends have known each other since college. They have all gathered at the Buzzard’s Bay house for years. As the narrator says, “those regular beach summits kept us bound. It seemed a mercy, having people around who remembered how you’d been before the edges were smoothed.” But time and adult obligations have taken people on separate paths, making their get-togethers at the house rare. The narrator has continued spending his summer vacations on Buzzard’s Bay with his wife and their twins, but as the novel starts, he has finally managed to organize a stay that will be with not only his family but the entire group. There is Rami, who does diplomatic work, much of it abroad. There’s Maya, “part of a prosperous community of African American burghers who summer on Martha’s Vineyard,” and her wife Shannon, who is white. Shannon is five months pregnant. Last among the group to arrive at the house is Bruce, a novelist, who has made a good living from his series about “the exploits of a philosophy professor who traveled the world and saved it from grave conspiracies, in between meals.” Bruce and the narrator have long had a vague rivalry between them, its origins hazy, but one thing about Bruce is clear: he may never have rid himself of his crush on the narrator’s wife.

These are the initial players, introduced almost as if the book will be a classical-style mystery, and of course, with this set-up, the college friends reuniting, many readers will see echoes of The Big Chill. Drinking and lively conversation ensue. Fresh seafood is grilled. The characters discuss past times and catch up on what they’ve been doing with their lives recently. They enjoy the sunny days, the saltwater swimming, the natural beauty around them. But the undercurrent of tension between the narrator and Bruce does not go away, and after they have an altercation on the beach, the surf lapping at them as they fight, Bruce vanishes. He takes his belongings with him and leaves no note or message behind, and it becomes clear to everyone else that wherever he went (Maybe back to his Manhattan apartment?), he will not be coming back. 

At this point, I was surprised to find myself thinking not only of The Big Chill and murder mystery conventions, but, of all things, the Iranian film About Elly, from 2009, directed by Ashgar Farhadi. That movie’s plot also involves a group of middle-class professionals, former university classmates, who gather on vacation in a large beach house and enjoy their time together until one of them disappears, perhaps by drowning, perhaps by simply leaving them without a word. Her disappearance naturally unsettles the group, and it serves as a catalyst for questioning and soul-searching among the friends. So too in The House on Buzzard’s Bay, the characters’ discussions less light than before Bruce vanished. In their talks, they dig into uncomfortable areas. Shared histories, shared baggage, can be fraught. The friends come to accept that they might not find out anytime soon what in fact happened to Bruce. A vanishing without an answer, thick fogs off the water sometimes obscuring what people may or may not be doing: one thinks also of the great Italian film, L’Avventura. That Murphy’s book has such varied associations is a mark of its richness, and he goes farther into the manipulation of tropes when events in his story take on a Gothic cast. The novel’s title itself evokes the thought of a New England ghost tale as much as it does a whodunnit, and once Bruce goes missing, these sinister elements ever so subtly come into play.

An attractive young woman named Camille shows up at the house, having been invited earlier by Bruce. She says they are “colleagues” and that she is helping him on his new book. Still, she doesn’t seem bothered by his disappearance, and it’s soon evident that she has her own interests to pursue in the area. She is doing research on the old Spiritualist campground that used to exist where the town now stands. Is the locale’s past the reason a peculiar eeriness often encroaches on the house? Even the narrator, a firmly grounded person, sometimes thinks so. He allows Camille to ask a local medium to put on a séance one night at the house, and her findings leave him confused, if not a believer in the unseen.

             “That house,” she said, “is troubled. You better figure out what it wants.”

             "It’s not troubled,” I said. Then added, rather half-heartedly, “That’s absurd.”

            “You’ve been getting messages, haven’t you? You and everyone who lives there. You’ll go on getting messages, communications, until you start listening to what it wants. That’s been the way of it, for me…”

When a house itself is thought to have needs, when that house is seen as a personality, you know we are in the realm of the Gothic. And is it also possible that someone thought to be flesh and blood is actually something else? Would you come to the realization about that person, like in the famous Ethan Wharton ghost story, only “Afterward”?

I mention Wharton, but Henry James is clearly an influence on Dwyer Murphy’s novel as well. Murphy writes in a clear style nothing like James’ style, but he writes with a wonderful patience, never rushing, and he has a talent for ambiguity that may remind you of the master. He can chill you quietly. As the story proceeds, besides the central question (What happened to Bruce?), more and more questions emerge. But isn’t that just like adulthood? When you were younger, life may have seemed straightforward. For the most part, it was uncomplicated. But time and the entanglements that come with age can cloud your view of life. You wind up having more questions about life than answers. Fear not, in this book, certain essential questions are answered, but perhaps not every single question is, and that is exactly how it should be.