August 18, 2022
Ninth House has a very sexy premise:
In Leigh Bardugo’s first offering to the adult genre, Yale University wears claws hidden in a velvet glove, magic doesn't require skill so much as a steady lavishing of grotesqueries, and men in power use their loyalty to underground societies to further their own ambitions—without counting the cost.
Peering down from a lofty chair at the rest of the societies is House of Lethe, standing guard to ensure that their unwholesome affairs will not tip them into whirling chaos. To this end, Lethe needs someone who can see ghosts. Galaxy "Alex" Stern trails an army of ghosts that only she can see. They are clearly a matchmaker’s dream.
Alex throws herself at Lethe's offer and the chance to scrub her past clean, even when ordered to follow at Darlington’s heels like an obedient shadow. The problem is, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington sees Alex a little too clearly. However adequate Alex's lies are, Darlington’s gaze, fastened on her, is a mirror that grants a ruinous glimpse of herself. Now there is a fog creeping along at both of their heels, swallowing their footsteps and erasing their evidence, and when a girl winds up dead and Darlington melts to nothing before Alex’s eyes, the wrongness of Lethe, of Yale, of what they're doing is inescapable.
Darlington believed they were safe in Lethe—they were the shepherds, after all—but Alex knew Lethe only bestows the kind of protection that weighs and measures before it finds you worthy. The societies will always have a comfortable veil of money between them and the rest of the world, but when the deal Alex made falls through, she will once again be powerless. Alex, however, is a survivor. And survivors are harder to kill.
As I said, a very sexy premise. But actually reading this book felt as if I had been catfished. I kept asking myself: how it is it that I am not enjoying a book that is so perfectly calculated to be my literary ideal? And here, I think, is the answer.
Bardugo has always been good at fully bringing to life a place most of us can't pretend to know, and has already displayed a great gift for plot in her YA Grisha-verse books. Ninth House, however, has nothing of the vivid and mordant storylines that made Bardugo's previous books so winning. Despite its flashes of poignant beauty—there is a recurrent scene from this book that surfaces in my mind again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream: Alex standing, like a temple icon to an evil goddess, (“night ebbed and flowed around her in a cape of glittering stars”), and Darlington with a sword in his back that felled him to his knees, to her mercy, his plea of “Choose me” a frantic, unspoken chant—Ninth House’s blend of the mundane and the magical did not tip far enough to the latter for me. Bardugo also favors detailed explication over keeping a steady pace, and it’s problematic when the flow of the story is hampered by its slow build and lack of major plot movement. Some naïve corner of my mind kept holding its breath in expectation, but though the back-and-forth structure eventually takes on a deeper resonance as more secrets are gradually unearthed, I’m not sure it’s enough to forgive.
The hefty list of trigger warnings that accompanies this book is wild, and also true. Ninth House is definitely not for the squeamish. I don't know anyone who can read some of these scenes without their minds recoiling from the sheer wrongness of it. That said, Bardugo sometimes tries too hard for big, dramatic horror, and the violence comes off as gratuitous. As a result, I was deeply (and, as it turned out, accurately) concerned that some of the themes would just be dolloped on top of the story to serve for shock value. Ninth House is about all kinds of trauma, yet I found that the consequences of such a monumental thing are barely brushed upon. The novel is rife with flashbacks, seen through Alex’s eyes as she passively witnesses the horrifying events of her past, but her trauma-suppressed memories only resurface whenever it's convenient for the plot, and without much of a statement being made besides, which occasionally struck a sour note.
Ultimately, this is the novel’s biggest misstep for me—that it curiously avoids fully engaging with the meat of its themes. At points in Ninth House, it seems that Bardugo is setting herself up to make a deep point about privilege and power—mystical, emotional, institutional—and what happens when it's abused, even in small quiet ways, but nothing satisfying comes of it. And though the driving force of the narrative is a classic whodunit, with Bardugo structuring the book like a detective yarn of sorts, it doesn't real work: Alex is sharp, but the narrative hands her a few too many gifts, so whatever revelations she makes fall a bit flat.
The emotional register of Ninth House, too, is of a different order from either of Bardugo’s previous works—for me, at least. I don’t feel that the novel managed to pierce the veil that separates the reader from the human puzzle pieces on the page. Alex is a difficult character to like. I found her largely stiff and drab, one of those characters that are so passive and colorless that you wonder why all these intriguing people around them don't ditch them and hang out with each other instead. There’s a roaring vitality to her that’s always just beneath the surface, though, and I wanted to poke at it until it gave way to something more.
Despite having considerably less page-time, Darlington’s character, on the other hand, manages to shine amid a constant barrage of wonders and grotesqueries. There’s an embodied presence to him, depth and information—and it kept me riveted throughout.
Darlington lived with an endless commotion inside. He permanently discontent with the ordinary and convinced of the existence of the extraordinary, never losing the unbruised part of himself that believed in magic. There's something so touching about the way Darlington played this game, no matter how gruesomely it was stacked against him. He played it with a kind of mystic joy, always finding the beauty and magic in it. There's something here that speaks deeply to the thrill of being inside magic, instead of looking at it through a window. To be living it, to be a part of it, even when it was dangerous, even when it hurt. I needed at least 100 more pages of Darlington just talking about his passion for magic, to be honest.
Overall, I think Ninth House inches in many interesting directions, but never really arrives to any of them. That said, I'll be reading the next installment just for more glimpses of Darlington.
In Leigh Bardugo’s first offering to the adult genre, Yale University wears claws hidden in a velvet glove, magic doesn't require skill so much as a steady lavishing of grotesqueries, and men in power use their loyalty to underground societies to further their own ambitions—without counting the cost.
Peering down from a lofty chair at the rest of the societies is House of Lethe, standing guard to ensure that their unwholesome affairs will not tip them into whirling chaos. To this end, Lethe needs someone who can see ghosts. Galaxy "Alex" Stern trails an army of ghosts that only she can see. They are clearly a matchmaker’s dream.
Alex throws herself at Lethe's offer and the chance to scrub her past clean, even when ordered to follow at Darlington’s heels like an obedient shadow. The problem is, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington sees Alex a little too clearly. However adequate Alex's lies are, Darlington’s gaze, fastened on her, is a mirror that grants a ruinous glimpse of herself. Now there is a fog creeping along at both of their heels, swallowing their footsteps and erasing their evidence, and when a girl winds up dead and Darlington melts to nothing before Alex’s eyes, the wrongness of Lethe, of Yale, of what they're doing is inescapable.
Darlington believed they were safe in Lethe—they were the shepherds, after all—but Alex knew Lethe only bestows the kind of protection that weighs and measures before it finds you worthy. The societies will always have a comfortable veil of money between them and the rest of the world, but when the deal Alex made falls through, she will once again be powerless. Alex, however, is a survivor. And survivors are harder to kill.
“Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.”
As I said, a very sexy premise. But actually reading this book felt as if I had been catfished. I kept asking myself: how it is it that I am not enjoying a book that is so perfectly calculated to be my literary ideal? And here, I think, is the answer.
Bardugo has always been good at fully bringing to life a place most of us can't pretend to know, and has already displayed a great gift for plot in her YA Grisha-verse books. Ninth House, however, has nothing of the vivid and mordant storylines that made Bardugo's previous books so winning. Despite its flashes of poignant beauty—there is a recurrent scene from this book that surfaces in my mind again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream: Alex standing, like a temple icon to an evil goddess, (“night ebbed and flowed around her in a cape of glittering stars”), and Darlington with a sword in his back that felled him to his knees, to her mercy, his plea of “Choose me” a frantic, unspoken chant—Ninth House’s blend of the mundane and the magical did not tip far enough to the latter for me. Bardugo also favors detailed explication over keeping a steady pace, and it’s problematic when the flow of the story is hampered by its slow build and lack of major plot movement. Some naïve corner of my mind kept holding its breath in expectation, but though the back-and-forth structure eventually takes on a deeper resonance as more secrets are gradually unearthed, I’m not sure it’s enough to forgive.
The hefty list of trigger warnings that accompanies this book is wild, and also true. Ninth House is definitely not for the squeamish. I don't know anyone who can read some of these scenes without their minds recoiling from the sheer wrongness of it. That said, Bardugo sometimes tries too hard for big, dramatic horror, and the violence comes off as gratuitous. As a result, I was deeply (and, as it turned out, accurately) concerned that some of the themes would just be dolloped on top of the story to serve for shock value. Ninth House is about all kinds of trauma, yet I found that the consequences of such a monumental thing are barely brushed upon. The novel is rife with flashbacks, seen through Alex’s eyes as she passively witnesses the horrifying events of her past, but her trauma-suppressed memories only resurface whenever it's convenient for the plot, and without much of a statement being made besides, which occasionally struck a sour note.
Ultimately, this is the novel’s biggest misstep for me—that it curiously avoids fully engaging with the meat of its themes. At points in Ninth House, it seems that Bardugo is setting herself up to make a deep point about privilege and power—mystical, emotional, institutional—and what happens when it's abused, even in small quiet ways, but nothing satisfying comes of it. And though the driving force of the narrative is a classic whodunit, with Bardugo structuring the book like a detective yarn of sorts, it doesn't real work: Alex is sharp, but the narrative hands her a few too many gifts, so whatever revelations she makes fall a bit flat.
The emotional register of Ninth House, too, is of a different order from either of Bardugo’s previous works—for me, at least. I don’t feel that the novel managed to pierce the veil that separates the reader from the human puzzle pieces on the page. Alex is a difficult character to like. I found her largely stiff and drab, one of those characters that are so passive and colorless that you wonder why all these intriguing people around them don't ditch them and hang out with each other instead. There’s a roaring vitality to her that’s always just beneath the surface, though, and I wanted to poke at it until it gave way to something more.
Despite having considerably less page-time, Darlington’s character, on the other hand, manages to shine amid a constant barrage of wonders and grotesqueries. There’s an embodied presence to him, depth and information—and it kept me riveted throughout.
Darlington lived with an endless commotion inside. He permanently discontent with the ordinary and convinced of the existence of the extraordinary, never losing the unbruised part of himself that believed in magic. There's something so touching about the way Darlington played this game, no matter how gruesomely it was stacked against him. He played it with a kind of mystic joy, always finding the beauty and magic in it. There's something here that speaks deeply to the thrill of being inside magic, instead of looking at it through a window. To be living it, to be a part of it, even when it was dangerous, even when it hurt. I needed at least 100 more pages of Darlington just talking about his passion for magic, to be honest.
That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.
Overall, I think Ninth House inches in many interesting directions, but never really arrives to any of them. That said, I'll be reading the next installment just for more glimpses of Darlington.
