It takes real skill to write a doorstop of a book that stays compelling from start to finish. It takes just as much, and maybe even more, to write a book that contains an impossibly rich story in a short span of pages. Ghost Fish, the debut from Stuart Pennebaker, is a great example of the latter.
At twenty-three, Alison has had enough loss and dead-ends for a lifetime. She leaves her late grandmother’s dark and empty house and sets off for New York. Squeezed into a small apartment with too many roommates, Alison initially clings to Jen, a friend from back home and the only person she knows in the city, and quickly draws closer to Jen’s hot friend Noah. But the shine from that could-be relationship quickly dims—especially after a strange, ghostly fish appears in her apartment that Alison instantly knows is her sister who died five years before.
This ghost fish can’t say much from the water-filled pickle jar Alison keeps it in, but her sister’s meaning is clear in every wave of her fin and blink of her fishy eyes. Soon, Alison is racing back to her little room every chance she gets, turning down hang-outs with Noah and leaving the second she clocks out from her new job as a hostess at a pretentious hotel restaurant. Despite this, she finds herself developing unexpected connections with her new coworkers, and even her roommates. It doesn’t take long to realize she can’t build a life for herself and tend to this echo of her sister floating in a jar on her windowsill.
The real triumph of Ghost Fish is how immersive it is. Opening up this slim novel gives the feeling of unknowingly sinking into cool, deep water; closing brings you back to the surface, gasping for air. Pennebaker skillfully blends small details with the towering landscape of New York or the lapping water of Key West to make the background feel as lifelike as its characters. Jen, Alison’s only friend in New York, is both a ride-or-die friend and a school-days pal whose relationship has run its course. Her roommates are an odd and insular group, but maybe less insular than Alison initially gives them credit for. It would be easy to make them one-note characters, but Pennebaker respects them, and us, too much for that. Alison herself gives us observations are at once keen and distant, to the extent I wasn’t sure how aware she was of a crush growing so obviously to the rest of us. She doesn’t seem to see herself as the hero of her own story, but her imperfect view of herself is one that makes us feel for her, even if it’s against her will.
Ghost Fish is a story of grief, but it’s also a story of identity and starting over. Remembering a walk she took along the beach with her mother and sister—both dead and gone now—and seeing hundreds of dead horseshoe crabs. “My body was here, like the horseshoes on the beach, but if [my sister] couldn’t be anything, I would be nothing, too,” she says, even as she tries to make a new start for herself. The more she starts getting a tenuous hold on that new start, the better she can see how much she depends on her sister, and how that dependence might not be good for either her or her sister. Then again, knowing that and actually letting go are two very different things.
That tension is very relatable, even if you’ve never kept the fish ghost of your sister in a pickle jar on your windowsill. Ghost Fish is about grief, and about finding out who you are, and where you can be that purest version of yourself. It’s a brief and strange but beautiful story that is more than worth your time.
Ring Reads 