Book Review: Unexpected Guests at Blackbird Lodge
Unexpected Guests at Blackbird Lodge. Joyce Hicks, Encore, 4 August 2022, Paperback and eBook, 209 pages.
Reviewed by Stephanie Wilson Medlock.
Unexpected Guests at Blackbird Lodge deals with secret dreams and aspirations. The main character, Charlotte Adamsley, is the somewhat disaffected wife of innkeeper Will Adamsley. Helping him run an old hotel in the Adirondack Mountains of New York is not the life Charlotte imagined for herself when she was a young writing student doing an MFA in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
As the novel begins, Blackbird Lodge is preparing to host a weeklong writing retreat. Its elderly participants have signed on for seven days of instruction. The retreat organizers have supplied a famous author to mentor the writers, and also promise that an editor from a New York publishing house will arrive to look over the participants’ work at the end of the program.
Too late, Charlotte realizes that the man who will mentor the writers has changed his name. O.T. Bookman is none other than Otis Teeter Staszcyk, a former faculty member at her Michigan graduate school, with whom she had a passionate love affair nineteen years ago. Mr. Bookman is the source of another secret Charlotte has kept from her husband, one she is very afraid will now be revealed.
The novel goes on to introduce the reader to the famous bad-boy author Bookman, now in his late forties, with a second young wife and five-year-old son. His first novel met with great success, but his successive efforts have been less well-regarded. O.T. worries that he is a one-hit wonder and hopes his latest manuscript will once again set fire in the publishing world.
There are many other surprises in this short and witty novel. The group has also arranged for a second writing instructor, who turns out to be OT Bookman’s first wife, now going by the name of Lydia Beauvais Galesberg. She is the very woman he was married to while having an affair with his graduate student Charlotte. O.T. is shocked when his ex arrives but quickly sees the amorous possibilities—his ex-wife is looking very good. O.T. himself is the subject of lustful thoughts by his graduate assistant Ginny, his ex-wife, Lydia, and innkeeper Charlotte.
Ms. Hicks does a great job of articulating the personalities and foibles of all the participants, exposing their weaknesses but at the same time making them real and sympathetic. O.T. Bookman, the handsome habitual philanderer with a keen sense of his own desirability, is a particularly rich character. Despite his vanity, he can also be self-aware and generous.
The set of complications in this novel are worthy of a French farce. Once O.T. recognizes their former lover Charlotte, will they have an affair? Has Charlotte’s good-guy husband been harboring a desire for one of their annual visitors? Will Lydia Galesberg reveal that her current book is about her disastrous marriage with O.T.? Has there actually been a murder at Blackbird Lodge?
Hicks’s vivid characters rapidly create havoc at Blackbird Lodge. By the end of the week, however, all the plot twists had been resolved with surprising results. If anything, the author ties the ends together too quickly. The book would have benefitted from additional time spent on the main character’s dilemmas, giving them a greater richness.
This is a fast-paced and amusing novel, easily devoured in one sitting.