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    The Night Ocean
    The Night Ocean
    The Night Ocean
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Night Ocean

    Written by Paul La Farge

    Narrated by Elisabeth Rodgers

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, a riveting novel about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends-or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them. A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story "The Night Ocean"); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan-the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself. As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception-about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 7, 2017
    ISBN9781501945601
    The Night Ocean
    Author

    Paul La Farge

    Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York.

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    Reviews for The Night Ocean

    3.5/5

    114 ratings20 reviews

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    • 1/5
      This was difficult to continue. And I wish I had read the reviews before opening.
    • 2/5
      Great narration, mundane disappointing book. More an homage to Lovecraft the person then the art he made.
    • 3/5
      Really a mixed bag for me. I'm a 60 year old feminist scholar, so this is from that perspective. Things that I loved: - linking together constellations and shapes of history of all the writers of that generation surrounding Lovecraft. Pieces of the history of SciFi, which I love, connecting lines in the galaxy of stars. - I love reading about writer's lives, dreams, passions. I felt sad, but also enlightened, to uncover another layer of the persecution of queer Folk/ men, and communists, during those years. I loved the descriptions of East Coast cities and the foment of those times. I enjoyed hearing about Ursula, and Bill. I thought that the endgame, where the subtleties of horror stories became real, was brilliant, although not quite fleshed out. - However, as a female reader, it was really hard to swallow the main thread of the story of the book. A woman character I really didn't believe. Certainly no one I've ever known. She felt to me so deeply unreal and kind of helpless - made up - some male gaze fantasy about a loyal wife, her attraction to, longing for, unflagging dedication to, someone who was some kind of eternal puer. The fun, creative, dreamy, passionate, and edgy guy she met at a party, and never looked back. Sheesh. A profoundly unhealthy and possibly one-sided marriage arrangement carried on by an educated, professional psychiatrist. Bleh. It was painful to encounter that part of the story bc it was so blessedly cheap/lazy writing. - Keep swimming, Marina- keep swimming in the other direction.
    • 5/5
      I highly recommend THE NIGHT OCEAN (2017) by Paul La Farge. It is less H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos and more Roberto Bolano and The Savage Detectives.This novel is a love story to literature through the lens and lives of some of the purveyors of weird fiction. Plus there are jellyfish!•Frederick Pohl, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Hart Crane, and many other weird authors and science fiction authors make cameos. Ambrose Bierce is mentioned. William S. Burroughs makes appearances in multiple storylines as Bill and as Lee.The main stories are anchored upon two apparent (although maybe not) suicides—Charlie Willett in the present day and Robert Barlow in 1951—and the author/weird fiction fan L. C. Spinks who is their connection. A possibly homosexual relationship between Barlow and Lovecraft and the discovery of "The Erotonomicon" underlie all. And it is all complicated by Charlie Willett's fandom of Lovecraft, as a black man who reads and relishes a (now) known (and known to him) racist.
    • 4/5
      So I noticed that books are taking me way too long to read these days. But that doesn't matter. This books has its moments that keep me glued, but also has its moments where I want to put it down and leave it alone for days. It has a great story, and the narrator's voice is strong. It replaces my own when I read it. That goes for the framed story aspects as well. It's actually put me in move to revisit some of the books referenced in the book, and check out this I've never read.
    • 2/5
      The blurb for this book pulled me in. I enjoy a good mystery, and this looked like one with a bit of a psychological twist. But this did not deliver what I felt the blurb promised. Instead, I feel like I got a somewhat confusing mishmash of several different stories, one of which dragged on and seemed to detract from the main plot described in the book's blurb. This book could probably be about half of its length and be more effective in telling the story of Charlie and Marina. And with the long journey to the end, the way it resolves proved to be a bit of a letdown for me.

      [This review is based on an advance review copy received from the publisher via First To Read.]
    • 3/5
      Meh. A bit of a slog, unfortunately. Good idea, but not carried off.
    • 5/5
      This book doesn't so much drop names as fling them about as fistfuls of bright confetti: from the Lovecraft circle and early sci-fi writers, to William Burroughs, Whittaker Chambers, and Roy Cohn, to an 11-year-old Ursula Le Guin; but under it all is a sad story about identity, dreams, and death. It definitely deserves a spot in the new canon of the re-imagined Lovecraft.
    • 2/5
      What a slog. I barely made it through the first third of the book and finished it out of duty rather than interest.
    • 1/5
      *Book received through Penguin Publishing's First To Read Program*

      The idea for this book was intriguing and I couldn't wait to read it, but the actual book was a bit of a letdown. It was difficult to follow at times and rereading areas didn't help them to make sense. The plot of the book seemed to get a bit lost in all the 'extras' the other felt the need to add and generally made this book very long and boring to get through. I felt like this had a lot of potential, right up until I started reading. The narration through Marina, while sort of representing the views of a grieving person in their focus, was very, how to say this, boring and detracting from the idea of the stories within the book.
    • 3/5
      This is a book where my opinion of it has changed the longer I've been away from it. It's a strange book, and honestly its structure was nearly its undoing for me.

      The majority of the book is conducted in a way where the narrator is twice removed from the retelling of events, and when Marina does make an appearance, it's a single line of dialogue every 50 pages or so. This is contrary to the hook of the book, which promises her mission to get the truth of her husband's disappearance and apparent suicide, but her perspective doesn't resurface until the very end of the book, when she (finally) takes center stage, which means her own despair lacks punch.

      Had I written this right after finishing, I probably would have given this two stars, because it's own structure and scholarly conceit nearly sabotages the whole book. But I'm glad I waited, because it's allowed the shape of the story to settle into my mind, like a slow developing photo.

      There's lots to like about the book. There are fun twists and turns as it plays with alternative interpretations of Lovecraft as a person in history. On one hand presenting him as a repressed and tortured soul, and another as a heartless racist. The same dichotomy is played it in different fashions with each of the other primary characters, LC Spinks and her husband himself. This is the point of the book, and what has ultimately swayed my opinion on it. Ultimately, this book is about the impossible search for truth.

      Marina is desperately looking for revelation on what happened to her husband. She wants to understand his actions, even if it means she must follow his own obsessions to do so. She is forced to chase research that leads her several unreliable narrators deep. The motivations of their lies are not made clear, and perhaps the author's suggestion is that the motivation is meaningless, even thoughtless, much as the jellyfish that stings Marina at the end of the book.

      The implication is that to get to the truth is impossible. More specifically, to get to the truth of a person is impossible. We see glimpses, quick reflections shining off of a facet of one's personality, but we interpret it according to our own desires, and either their deception, or our own willful ignorance conceals the entirety of the individual. You don't ever see the whole, and perhaps that's for the best. For, if you look closer, the book may even be suggesting that there is no truth of consequence, and your search through those black waters will at best get you stung, and at worst you will drown, only to become lost in the dark.

      And that, that, is something worth thinking on, and earns the book its extra star.
    • 1/5
      At first, I was drawn into the story with its detailed introduction into the life of Lovecraft and the scandal of his time spent with Barlow. While it was interesting to read about, I soon began to wonder when the story was going to kick in. At the midpoint, I started to see some direction and discover how Charlie got involved in this story. But this glimpse also vanished fairly quickly, as the author spent countless chapters recounting the experiences of Barlow, Lovecraft, Spinks, and a whole host of other characters. Pretty soon, I got lost in the details of the story - and not in a good way. I came into this story with one expectation and left this story completely clueless. I'm sure I missed something somewhere but for the life of me, I couldn't fathom the point of this story. I felt as if nothing meaningful was ever really said throughout this entire novel, and it left me disappointed. There are some raving reviews for this novel on Goodreads, so maybe I am one of the few for whom this novel just didn't work. If you like literary fiction and Lovecraft, then I'm sure you would enjoy this novel.

      I received this review as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      A woman psychiatrist relives her days with a depressive husband who seems to have disappeared...[in progress]
    • 4/5
      A book about fantasy this is not a fantasy or science fiction though it is somewhat a history of the writers of fantasy and science fiction. It is a horror story with only human monsters, singular and plural and the monster within that hears and believes what it wants to hear. Three difficult lives are fictionalized within a framework getting closer to the narrator each time.
    • 4/5
      The Night Ocean is a Russian nesting doll of a book: a story within a story within a story, all working in parallel or not at all. It's completely maddening and fascinating, frustrating and gigantic in scale. It is a book that should not work, one that could almost drown under the weight of details. But following through to the end is an adventure that is worth taking.
    • 4/5
      This was an interesting book but hard to classify or tag. It's a book about books and about authors. There is a lot of name dropping. It is also historical and a mystery and it is about the genre horror or weird fiction and it covers things like prejudices, homosexuality, WWII and life after the war and there is a bit of Canada and Mexico. and the USA. The main author is Lovecraft who was unknown except by a few until he died. I've only read his Mountains of Madness which is on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. The story starts out with Charlie Willett, a black married to Marnie, a psychiatrist who practices psychoanalysis and prescribes Ambien and Adderall. Charlie starts investigating Lovecraft and a couple of other guys and writes a book that is later proven (or maybe not) to be a hoax. Charlie later disappears from the psychiatric hospital to be assumed to suicide. So the long list of literary who's who that show up in this book are Bolaño, Flannery, Ursula K. LeGuin, Edgar Rice Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiel Hammett, James McCain, William Burroughs. So literature as hoax, writing fiction that seems so real you take it as truth. This book is a little bit like that. It was hard to know what was fact and what was fiction. It was a fiction but it was so well written that you kept having to remind yourself that it was fiction. Therefore I do think it offered a newness to fiction, it captured the age, mood and relevance of then and now without making it obvious that it was trying to be politically correct or cover all the basis so not to offend. In fact this book takes on the offenses that exist. It covered sexual matter which made up the point of the book. Mostly it was not offensive. The Erotonomicon was considered erotic pornography and was treated as "banned book material" in the fifties. One issue that I think the book did address is how what we write about someone can ruin their lives, how the internet can be used by people who otherwise would have little influence to actually hurt you. The characters were interesting, fully developed and more than two dimensional. The book was readable. I enjoyed it and it wasn't difficulty to get through. Quotes;"...That's no reason our reproductive biologhy should show up in literature." "sex is human, and novels can't just ignore it." "as for humanity, I get enough of it just taking a streetcar. What I want, when I sit down to read a novel is wonder." "worst mistke you can make is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices....second worst mistake is to think you arn't looking t hrough the lens of your prejudices." "we know to the point of forgetting". rating; 4
    • 4/5
      The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge is the story of a summer author H.P. Lovecraft spend in Florida with the family of a teenage fan and of what happened. It's the story of Charlie, who had disappeared from a psychiatric facility and was presumed dead, and of his wife, Marina, who was looking for him and for clues she hoped could be found in looking into Charlie's research into Lovecraft's life. The Night Ocean tells the story of a book published and immediately banned, a book formed of Lovecraft's own diaries, or it's a book about a controversial forgery, written by a hard-to-track-down con man. It's the story of Barlow, the boy who spent a summer with Lovecraft and about his adulthood as a college professor in Mexico City, where he would encounter William S. Burroughs under less than ideal circumstances. And, finally, it's the story of a fraudster, who both is and isn't telling the truth. The Night Ocean is a clever novel, crammed full with fascinating people, none of whom are telling the truth, even on the third or fourth "real" version of events. I was utterly unable to untangle the mess of lies and plot threads and I didn't care. This book was so entertaining, with the stories growing more interesting as the book progresses, so that the story of an old man living in a small lakeside town in Ontario is the most compelling of the bunch. Lovecraft is a tricky person to write about. He was an undeniably imaginative writer of that genre that combines science fiction and horror, but he was racist even by the standards of a century ago. He's about a controversial a figure as one can use to fashion a novel around, and La Farge ducks and avoids the issue in an unsatisfying way, in large part by only allowing Lovecraft into the novel in small doses and keeping him talking about other things. But Lovecraft is not the most interesting character here, nor is Charlie, the person the novel is structured around; both he and his wife Marina remain ciphers. But Barlow and Spinks, two men whose lives were shaped by Lovecraft, are wonderfully drawn, so complex and alive even when one is hiding the truth and the other is lying as fast as his lips will allow.
    • 4/5
      When Marina's husband Charles checks out of the mental hospital after having a breakdown and disappears with only his clothes left behind at the shore of a lake, she retraces his footsteps in the hopes he might still be alive. Charles had recently published a successful book about H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, which was later exposed as based on a hoax perpetrated by L. C. Spinks, who also wrote an erotic diary purported by be Lovecraft about Barlow but was yet another hoax.This book really hit all of my buttons. It's about writers and writing and books, and so many American genre writers of the early twentieth century and their associates turn up as characters that it's like being at the most fascinating cocktail party. (WIlliam S. Burroughs was my favorite of them, absolutely.) There are stories nested within stories within stories, and no narrator can be trusted. In the end, fact and fiction become inextricably blurred, but this is largely the point. I loved it.
    • 4/5
      I picked this up on because it is part of the 2017 Rooster Summer Reading Challenge. I heard on Litsy it was about Lovecraft (whom I have never read), so I quickly read a couple of his stories (including The Call of Cthulhu) on Serial Reader, which definitely helped me understand parts of this.But I ended up loving this book! I am always a little uncomfortable with novels that feature real people. I was glad to see that some of the descendants had actually provided LaFarge source material (per the acknowledgements).And though this book is about Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, it also isn't. You don't need to know everything about those two--though much is told here. I think. Because what this novel is really about is Truth. What is Truth? Who gets to tell it? How can you tell it is the Truth? How much research does one need to do to be sure the Truth is the correct Truth? AT what point do you stop? Or when do you throw up your hands and give up?As a trained (and not practicing--just reading everything from books to magazines to museum displays I like it all LOL) historian, this sort of story kind of freaks me out. It is, actually, more horrific to me than anything Lovecraft might have written.
    • 4/5
      My takeaway from this read is, at any given time, I could not distinguish fact and reality from fiction and lies. I struggled to reach the end. Perhaps because I just don't give a hoot about Lovecraft's sexuality. Is he is or is he isn't? I went off to review his life details, to see if that would help me. Nope. It is a clever premise, those devotees of the great man who tried to love him, literally and figuratively, but they, too, were accomplished at making up stories to push themselves ahead. The language fools me. It reads like a matter-of-fact history of these men and their times. Bottom line, I remain confused about the truth interwoven in this creative package, I am not certain whether to recommend this book or not. My thanks to the author and the Penguin First to Read program for a complimentary copy.