{"id":9077,"date":"2021-06-28T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-28T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9077"},"modified":"2021-06-27T18:42:33","modified_gmt":"2021-06-27T22:42:33","slug":"the-beresford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9077","title":{"rendered":"The Beresford"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In Will Carver\u2019s new literary thriller, The Beresford is a grand old pile at the edge of an unnamed city. The bottom two floors contain the quarters of Mrs. May, the landlady, the \u2018library,\u2019 and four furnished flats\u2014spacious, airy, and cheap\u2014and she has no difficulty keeping them filled. From the time a tenant departs, no more than a minute passes before a replacement rings the front bell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the story opens, Mrs. May has two tenants in residence, a third arriving momentarily. One is the insufferably pretentious conceptual artist Sythe, n\u00e9 Aidan Gallagher, desperate to escape his Irish farm-boy roots and even more desperate to become a famous painter. He makes heavy use of Mrs. May\u2019s immaculate back garden and its burning bin, where he destroys piles of disappointing artworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A longer-term tenant is Abe Schwartz, whom the narrator introduces by saying, \u201cYour daughter brings home Abe Schwartz and you\u2019re pleased. Not for her.\u201d He\u2019s polite, normal, nice. So of course Abe interrupts what he\u2019s doing to help the new tenant, Blair Conroy, shuttle her boxes up the Beresford\u2019s imposing staircase. After a week or so, she notices that, although she\u2019s heard a lot about Sythe, she hasn\u2019t met him. Nor will she, as Abe has murdered him. When she arrived that first day, he was preparing to dismember the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the grim situation, Carver\u2019s deft touch maintains an upbeat tone and romance blossoms between Abe and Blair. Meanwhile, oblivious Mrs. May keeps her rigid schedule, which involves numerous glasses of wine during the day, violent prayer, and an afternoon siesta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the story progresses, you may hear a bizarre echo of the Eagles\u2019s hit, \u201cHotel California\u201d: \u201cYou can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.\u201d At least not in one piece. Carver keeps the story moving along briskly with new people to meet, including some who are asking too many questions and whose tenancy may be rather short. They\u2019re all initially charmed by the building and their dotty new landlady, which conjures up another line from the same song: \u201cThis could be Heaven or this could be Hell,\u201d with The Beresford leaning distinctly toward the latter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newcomer Gail upends the uneasy equilibrium. She\u2019s escaped an abusive husband, and she and Abe incinerate her cell phone (a literal burner) to stop his offensive texts. Complicating matters, she\u2019s unexpectedly pregnant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carver leads off his novel with an epigram credited to Charles Bukowski: \u201cSome people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.\u201d This may lead you to wonder about the extent of crazy at work in this story. Being overcome by madness is referred to several times, even when Abe muses about his affection for Blair. For the most part, he thinks, love is interchangeable with madness, but nobody would ask to be mad. As Gail obsesses on the future of her unborn child, she too is increasingly unhinged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much does ancient Mrs. May know? Or suspect? You\u2019ll start to wonder that during the awkward dinners she hosts for new arrivals. She challenges her guests with Faustian questions like, What do you most want in the world?, and its dangerous corollary, What would you do to get it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an entertaining book, full of surprises. Carver\u2019s smooth writing style and the hothouse environment he creates prevent you from being troubled by certain logistical details. And, at the end, don\u2019t be surprised if you recall a third \u201cHotel California\u201d lyric, \u2018They just can\u2019t kill the Beast.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Find it at Amazon<\/a> or at your favorite indie bookstore<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Will Carver\u2019s new literary thriller, The Beresford is a grand old pile at the edge of an unnamed city. The bottom two floors contain the quarters of Mrs. May, the landlady, the \u2018library,\u2019 and four furnished flats\u2014spacious, airy, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Beresford - a literary thriller about an apartment building that, like most things \"too good to be true,\" is just the opposite.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,40,1160,126,32],"tags":[1875,1874],"class_list":["post-9077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-fiction","category-horror","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-the-beresford","tag-will-carver"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2mp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9077"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9079,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9077\/revisions\/9079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}