This book was either frustrating in the extreme, despite the absorbing plot and characters, or else I just didn’t get it. It ended in the way that many of us fear LOST (the TV series) will end: ambiguously and without answers. Consider yourself warned.

I enjoyed reading The Little Stranger, but I enjoyed reading it because I thought I would find an explanation for the suspenseful events of the novel by the end. If you read The Little Stranger hoping to find out what is causing strange things to happen at Hundreds Hall, you will be disappointed. The book has drawn comparisons to Edgar Allan Poe and to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, but there is a difference. When I read The Turn of the Screw, I was also frustrated by the ambiguity and the unresolved ending. But as I thought more about it, I realized that one could choose how to interpret the book, there were “plausible” answers to the questions raised in the books and there were more supernatural possibilities. But there were answers. The Little Stranger is not so satisfactory in this regard. All of the people in the book could be insane, but that’s hardly likely. There could be actual ghosts at Hundreds Hall, but since everyone experiences the ghostly events in the book quite differently, that solution doesn’t satisfy either. As a third possibility, some real person could be producing the supernatural effects at Hundreds Hall for some nefarious purpose, but it’s not clear how that could be true either. In fact, it seems impossible –which brings us back to insanity or a multitude of ghosts.

Some ambiguity at the end of a book, or a TV series, is acceptable. Total confusion and anticlimactic dissatisfaction is not. It’s the difference between fiction and real life: in real life sometimes I must resign myself to never knowing how the story ends because “we see through a glass darkly.” I want my fiction to have an ending.

Other bloggers say:

Fleurfisher: “It made me want to go back and look at things again, and this could well be a book that has much more to offer with subsequent readings. And the ending? It’s subtle and could be read in more than one way.”

Stephen Lang: “It is beautifully paced, full of subtle observations and quite simply a pleasure to read. It is also one of the most effective, chilling and original ghost stories I have read for some time. I finished The Little Stranger a few days ago but, still thinking it through, I have been unable to start a new book.”

Nicola: “It did not end the way I had expected and I was quite shocked with the outcome and actually quite annoyed that things ended up the way they did. I’ve had time to recuperate now, but that is the sign of good characterization, when a book’s characters mean so much to you that you are invested in them and want all to end well for them all.”

Miles’s twin brother Hayden has been missing for ten years. Every year or two Miles receives a letter or an email or a phone call that sends him off on another wild goose chase to locate and perhaps rescue his mentally disturbed, possibly criminal, brother.

A few days after graduation Lucy Lattimore leaves her hometown in Ohio in a Maserati with her high school history teacher. He takes her to Nebraska to a deserted motel on the edge of a dried-up lake, and there she begins to notice that Mr. George Orson may not be exactly the man she thought he was.

Ryan Schuyler drops out of college and goes on the road with his long-lost con man dad, Jay. Ryan’s OK with using stolen identities and using computers to move money from one bank account to another, but he’s puzzled about unreadable email he’s getting written in Cyrillic script. What’s that all about?

What do these three stories, these several lives, have in common? Author Dan Chaon has woven an intricate web of lies, deceit, multiple identites and personalities, and stories told, believed and rejected to make up this novel about a Great Imposter. I was, of course, reminded of the original Great Imposter, Ferdinand Waldo Demara.

I was also reminded of an old friend who admired Demara and took him as something of a role model. My friend, “Bill,” was something of an imaginative storyteller himself, always looking for ways to aggrandize himself and his own history. He used multiple names and told people that he was a colonel in the Air Force or a rabbi or private detective. He was a member of several churches, and he loved to talk about the Bible and about Jesus Christ. I truly think Bill believed his own stories, at least while he was telling them. As far as I know Bill never did anything criminal, but he did have a few close calls in which people to whom he had told different stories met up with one another and compared notes. It was a sad thing to watch from the outside, and yet Bill truly loved people. And people loved him, usually even when they found out that he was not completely trustworthy. Bill died a few years ago, and his funeral was attended by many, many people who knew at least parts of him and loved the man they knew.

The identity chameleon in Chaon’s novel, Hayden Cheshire, is similarly charismatic and even more enmeshed in his own lies. The novel is a convoluted walk through Hayden’s convoluted life from the points of view of his victims, those who fall for his lies and fall for Hayden’s charm. If you’ve never met anyone like Bill or Hayden, you might find aspects of the novel unbelievable, but let me assure you, it could happen. Hayden is believed by his brother to be schizophrenic or to have a personality disorder, but he is also quite capable of shedding personalities and identities and taking on new ones and juggling schemes and bank accounts and destroying lives as he passes through them.

I found this novel to be both fascinating and disturbing, and although the ending was a bit abrupt and unresolved, I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the themes of deceit and imposture and identity theft. You’ll find a lot to ponder in this near-attack on very idea of fixed identity.

I thought this paragraph in Chaon’s acknowledgements at the back of the book was interesting since I’m always interested in literary influences. Mr. Chaon writes:

“This book pays homage, and owes a great deal, to many fantastic and better writers who inspired me, both in childhood and beyond, including Robert Arthur, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Ira Leven, C.S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Peter Straub, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Tryon, and a number of others. One of the fun things about writing this book was making gestures and winks toward those writers I’ve adored, and I hope that they —living and dead—will forgive my incursions.”

I did notice some of those gestures and winks, but reading that statement made me want to re-read the book and look for the ones I missed.