'Bittersweet' A Novel By Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Lives Up To Its Title

Bittersweet, a modern gothic mystery set against Lake Champlain, is the third novel by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore and follows an outsider brought in to the thrall of an old money family, the Winslows.

The novel sits at an intersection of literary fiction and beach read melodrama. The characters tend toward magnified feelings and characterizations, the twists – of which there are many – read as something between a Kennedy family confessional and an episode of ABC’s Revenge. There are over the top moments, almost all of which revolve around sex and lies, which border farce at certain points. Beverly-Whittemore keeps the over-dramatic scenes from falling over the edge by appropriately spacing them out with competent plotting, and Mabel, our humble narrator, winks at the audience in such a way to keep the plot from taking itself too seriously.

The basics are: Mabel Dagmar and Genevra Winslow—names that only exist in fiction—are mismatched college roommates that, through a death in the rich and prissy Winslow family, manage to become friends. Over the summer, poor, mid-western Mabel travels to one of the cottages the Winslow families owns along Lake Champlain, where family truths long quiet are finally given words.

The fact that Bittersweet intends to be the fence between literary fiction and the melodramatic, easy beach read tends to make the novel fight itself a bit. The prose is lengthy, sometimes overly so, while the dialogue is on the nose, as are the novel’s thematic connections – Jane Eyre and Paradise Lost.

Neurotic Mabel leads the story here, sometimes shuffling her voice between journalistic clarity and over-written, self-important fluff. However, that’s a bit of its own character development: Mabel is in her first year of college, is generally unsure of her place in the world and among the Winslow family and is constantly battling herself and others with her own feelings of inadequacy, constantly attempting to prove herself. While the prose can sometimes be purple, in its own way, it’s kind of supposed to be.

Much of the book depends on how Beverly-Whittemore handles the Winslow family. For the most part, she succeeds. They’re of old money and have dark secrets that go back generations and begin shortly before the Great Depression; the members are snooty or overly kind and seemingly without an upper limit on influence. Unfortunately, the mystery that surrounds them as well as the amount of power they yield end up causing the story to trip over itself. Truly, the novel doesn’t actually begin until a quarter of the way through, and getting there can be like wading through a swamp. When a family is built up to be this powerful, the clue and minor mistakes that allow the secrets revealed tend to be a letdown: all these years and no one thought to simply re-cover the back of that Van Gogh? How could a potbellied seventy year old outrun an athletic twenty-year-old? Finally, near the end the incest/suicide well is revisited a few too many times to make the twist sustainable and still shocking, and the greater questions are never really asked, let alone answered.

Beverly-Whittemore, at times, writes with the idea that all rich people are evil; she’s built a mostly believable mythology with the Winslow family. For Mabel to want so badly to be accepted as one of them, even in the face of all of the corruption and lies, they need to have a charisma that has the pull of gravity. This is where the melodramatic leanings meet the literary to a successful union. The Winslows are on the right side of bombastic, theatrical even in their quieter moments, and you can’t help but want to be around these people even if you’re not sure why. The crazy aunt and beautiful siblings certainly couldn’t hurt the deal.

Near the middle, the romantic subplot tends to take a necessary spotlight leading toward a finale that, while a bit staccato, fits into the unfinished change that Mabel has been going through. A lifetime of going without makes the idea of continuing to do so, after being teased with having every whim satisfied, too tragic for her. Smartly, Beverly-Whittemore keeps the family from full public debasement, opting instead to keep the Kennedy-esque aspect of the family intact: every scandal can be covered; whatever it is, money can be piled atop it. Mabel is seduced both by a love for wealth and by romance. The most disquieting moment is played subtly and is perfect for it: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Since Mabel is the narrator and moral compass of Bittersweet, this change was given the appropriate room to unfold naturally—God knows in many ways she deserves happiness—and seeing a character with scruples and having them tested only to fall short is a voyeuristic fantasy for a reader (it makes us feel superior if nothing else). Realistically and honestly, who wouldn’t have sided with the Winslows when all that money and power was up for grabs? Nobody. That’s the story Beverly-Whittemore was telling and she told it successfully.

The ending of Bittersweet is well choreographed, but how it was that Mabel got there was forced. When a novel builds to the idea of a morality play then refuses to explore the questions it has raised, the result is uneven and ultimately flat. This is where the genre splicing faltered in Bittersweet. The rules of the summer beach read demands sex and blood and love, and at the end, everyone gets to have what they want. The rules of mysteries and literary fiction demand reverberations and consequences, and often a happy ending feels like a cheat.

Genre splicing is provocative to a writer. To write for one genre successful is to charge up a mountain with no provisions except your own wits; attempting to combine two often-disparate genres is climbing the mountain twice and with a broken leg. If you’re successful, you could very well have created a new sub-genre and maybe have written a classic. If you don’t, the creation is malformed and not successful in either of its fields.

Bittersweet is a mixed bag. The plot is choppy, though, the Winslow family is charismatic and mysterious enough to at least give it a try.