In Hungry Ghost Theater, a loving, dysfunctional half-Jewish family of performers, scientists, and activists long to wake up the world but must first rescue each other from their own addictions and compulsions, with a little help (and sometimes hindrance) from the occasional ghost or god.
“Mythical, magical, and wonderfully original, this fractured family portrait artfully fuses the personal and the political, life and art, the worlds we see and those hidden from us. Sarah Stone is a writer of great power and unusual vision.”
“With her laser intelligence and gorgeous prose style, Sarah Stone has written a thrilling hybrid of a novel about the intricacies of family life and the inevitable handing down from one generation to the next of our deepest passions and pathologies. Set around the world—and in the next one—this book is both marvelously inventive and deeply humane. I loved it.”
“These are astonishing stories. Sarah Stone traces out the quirky, fateful dramas of one family, while having the visionary originality to take the longest possible view of human action. I found this an unforgettable book, astute, vivid, and stubbornly ambitious in its scope. ”
“Sarah Stone’s Hungry Ghost Theater is about the roles we unintentionally or obligingly play in the drama of life. It’s about the families we’re born into and the families we try to create with (seemingly) like-minded people. It’s the kind of book I love most: a novel of integrity and intelligence and artfulness, rendered in prose so beautiful that at times it breaks your heart. ”
“In Hungry Ghost Theater, Sarah Stone shows us an array of characters and worlds in a tour de force of the imagination. As she leads us through the odyssey of family and the interaction of siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and parents, Stone shines innumerable prisms on the blurred boundaries between art and life. Her beautiful, even-handed writing conceals sly wit and an eye that is both pitiless and compassionate. By the end of this book you will have traveled to a thousand worlds and discovered that you live in all of them.”
Reviews
“Prepare to be seduced straightaway by the sensuous beauty and penetrating wisdom of Sarah Stone’s second novel, “Hungry Ghost Theater” — starring the gifted, tormented, half-Jewish Zamarin family, 1993 through 2005.
At its forefront, the brother-sister team of Robert and Julia strive (against powerful tensions from within and without) to create wake-the-masses art through their political-theater group. Their sister Eva, a neuroscientist, seeks a scientific basis for human empathy: “It makes sense to think you can understand a creature with a hundred thousand neurons. But it’s crazy to think you can understand a creature with a hundred billion, or any systems they invent.”
Eva’s youngest daughter, Arielle, thrashes through ordeals of addiction, by turns anguishing and mobilizing the others. With calm control, Stone spirits us deeply into not just one but an array of worlds, from psychiatric social work to biology and (never least) theater, which may stand both for itself and for the cosmic overview: “[D]aily life … for most performers: waiting tables during the day, taking time off for auditions, getting commercial work sometimes … more often … no work at all … When you’ve been playing regional dinner theater — whether it’s Ado Annie in Oklahoma or a junior hyena in The Lion King — it becomes harder … to get other kinds of roles, and in the process, the very nature and intent of your performances begin to change.”
The grown Zamarin children — their friends, lovers, parents; their own children — feel so molten with life we sense we know them; their preternatural intelligence, embattled history and headlong caring will remind many readers of the ensemble peopling Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows.”
Set in our Bay Area, in Zanzibar, Seoul and later in what another reviewer calls “a series of Tibetan and Sumerian hells,” “Hungry Ghost’s” too-real souls may linger to gently haunt: their fierce particulars accruing to reveal, by book’s end, a lustrous vision.”
“Two sets of siblings from two generations form the nexus of Stone’s (The True Sources of the Nile, 2002) tantalizing exploration of the concepts of predestination versus free will and the unresolved questions that pulse through a family beset by shocking tragedies. As children traveling across country in the aftermath of their mother’s incarceration in a mental hospital, Robert, Eva, and Julia are exposed to a troupe of itinerant thespians called the Theater of the Oppressed, setting teenage Robert and five-year-old Julia on a path to eventually creating a similar experimental theater of their own. Ever the skeptic, middle-child Eva pursues a career as a neuroscientist, but her own three children—Katya, Jenny and Arielle—end up supplying her with dramas and tragedies to rival anything her theatrical siblings can stage. Through interconnected stories that travel in time back to Chicago in the mid–1970s to the Santa Cruz mountains in the early 2000s, with stops in Zanzibar and Korea along the way, Stone’s ingenious deconstruction of family life is a shrewd, evocative, and arresting portrait of dissolution and despair.”
from Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel
The dark warehouse chills Arielle through her coat and gloves—she and her sisters stare at their aunt as she descends an iron staircase, undressing. Torches cast a smoky, wavering light, half-illuminating the audience, who sit in a circle around the stage. A thin, harsh, persistent music turns the warehouse into a haunted cave. Aunt Julia—Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, according to the photocopied program—has stripped down to her underwear and jeweled armbands. A blue-white spotlight strikes the mirrored floor of the stage, lighting both Inanna and her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead and the Underworld, who sits on a throne at the bottom of the staircase. White makeup with sharp black lines and areas of red covers the faces of both queens: they look like warriors, like demons, like the angry dead.
Arielle, Jenny, and Katya have heard about their Aunt Julia and Uncle Robert’s performances but have never, until now, been allowed to see one. “They’re for adults,” their mother said when they first asked. “Putatively.”
“Too much sex for us?” asked Katya, and her mother said, “If it were only that.” Later, she said, “When you’re older you can go, if you still want to, but you’ll be sorry.” They badgered her this time, though, until she gave in—sooner or later, she always does if they keep at her.
Arielle feels as if she’s inside one of her own nightmares, but she can’t look away from the stage. Maybe she doesn’t even want to. She’ll never forget this play—if she can get through it. She’s become more and more uneasy as, at each of the seven landings, Uncle Robert’s amplified voice gave Aunt Julia—Inanna—another command: “You must surrender your scepter and crown to pass through this gate,” or, “You must surrender your golden robe to pass through this gate.” Whenever Inanna asked why, he repeated, “This is our way in the netherworld,” sounding cold and formal, like a stranger. So at each gate, Inanna dropped something on the stairs and left it behind: her lapis lazuli scepter, her neckpiece, her robe, her dress, her slip.
Now at the bottom of the steps, Inanna takes off the last of her clothing and jewelry and walks onto the stage completely naked. Crouching figures emerge from the sides and move toward her. Movie images flicker on each of the walls behind the audience—one with soldiers in uniforms in the desert and tanks firing, another with planes in the air at night, a third with President—now ex-President—Bush talking, a fourth with a bald man the children only slightly recognize. Someone in charge of the war and too many other things, someone their father hates and goes on about. The bald man talks silently, smiling.
Arielle can see her own breath in the cold air. Aunt Julia might be crying, or is it a trick of the light? The Queen of Heaven and Earth descending into the underworld for her brother-in-law’s funeral, and her sister won’t let her in. Well, why wouldn’t you cry? Arielle’s thinking about all this deliberately, trying to stop her fear, to stay separate from it. But the play has made her part of its world, like one of the dreams where she’s trapped in a culvert with someone coming after her, on the verge of learning something she doesn’t want to know. The old feeling’s coming over her, her breathing starting to close up, tears rising in her throat. She takes off a glove and feels around under her folding seat, pressing her forefinger against the metal edge where a rough bolt fastens the legs to the chair.
“Don’t wriggle, Arielle,” whispers her mother, and she holds still again, but the tears are coming back.
She waits until she can’t stand it, then presses her finger against the bolt, hard. In the half-dark, when her mother is watching the stage, she looks down at her finger, the blood very slow, just a drop or two. The pressure eases, but not enough. Moving very slowly, not to draw attention to herself, she presses until there’s enough pain to help. She slides her glove over her bleeding finger and lets out her breath, slowly, the tears receding again.
