In the lexicon of reviewer-speak, entries don’t come more hackneyed than “haunting”. The urge to reach for it should be a critic’s cue to do more thinking, and yet in the case of Leanne Shapton’s new volume, Guestbook, this diaphanous adjective feels oddly precise. It’s a book that is, after all, subtitled Ghost Stories; more particularly, its pages summon up a persistently uncanny atmosphere that is impossible to pin down, remaining purposefully, lingeringly opaque.
Shapton, who helped judge last year’s Man Booker prize, is a quirky, determined talent: in her youth, she trialled for a place in Canada’s Olympic swimming team, and a portion of her early professional life was spent as art director of the New York Times’s op-ed page. She is as at home with pictures as she is text, requiring her audience to master a skill she calls “visual reading”.
Comprising 33 short stories and vignettes, Guestbook doubles as a kind of art project, its curated ephemera running to found photographs, architectural plans and Shapton’s almost disconcertingly pretty watercolours. It ties together two of her central preoccupations: the idea that possessions and objects might retain an imprint or an echo of their owners, as explored in 2009’s Important Artifacts… , and the ways in which we’re “haunted” by ex-lovers and their ex-lovers, which animated 2006’s Was She Pretty?
Among the men and women temporarily possessed by one another and the vintage couture that whispers of its past wearers are plenty of straightforward ghost stories. One of the most satisfyingly sinister describes a tennis champ named Billy Byron, who is coached court-side by an imaginary friend, Walter. When Walter’s demands drive him to exhaustion, he undergoes therapy with an expert on “sensed presence”, a phenomenon in which explorers and shipwreck survivors find themselves joined by an unexplained presence. Ernest Shackleton and Charles Lindbergh both experienced it, apparently.
Elsewhere, a spirit attaches itself to a woman on a tour of Alcatraz, a girl smells her favourite teacher’s soap in her room the night before learning of his death, and a figure – unseen at the time – reveals itself in a dog video shot on a phone.
Though these contemporary tales are often framed by lives of ease and accomplishment (that cellular apparition is shared at a four-course dinner and fashion show), Shapton has fun with the form’s gothic tropes. Her narratives purport to be true, and feature furniture that moves of its own accord and mysterious stains that appear on walls. There’s even a series of photos in which a figure cloaked in a bedsheet advances across the page. Who Is This Who Is Coming? its title playfully asks.
Shapton adds her own twists to these staples: there’s a menacing melancholy to the photograph of a drab kitchen “modernised” in 1974, and elsewhere piles of grubby snow bring a physical chill. Most compellingly, she seems to suggest a fresh way of defining the spectre for our own age. If part of what makes ghosts so unnerving is their ability to be both here and yet not here, then our distracted, dissatisfied, superficial culture creates ghosts even of the living. It’s there online, as depicted in a prose poem composed entirely of Instagram comments (“So beautiful./I love./That looks relly [sic] relaxing”), and in the real world, too, captured via the five spreads of society photos that make up A Geist: one night, 38 parties, and every image includes the same blue-suited gadfly, one Edward Mintz.
Throughout, Shapton’s prose will leave you craving more. She is, above all, a mistress of concision, able to capture character with just two observations (“Tom is a finger shaker and letter writer”), and to compress what feels like an entire novel into four short sentences: “The other woman had once waited for the man. Waited and wished, then had given up. He wished too. Now he waits.”
Of course, this book is an artefact in itself – a tactile, mysterious and seductive one. Read it once and you’ll be very likely to find yourself eyeing it every now and again, wondering whether it’s exactly where you left it, and whether you could possibly have turned down the corner of this page or that.
• Guestbook: Ghost Stories by Leanne Shapton is published by Particular Books (£22). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
