A House with Secrets 
 Rebecca Makkai's 2015 collection of stories, Music for Wartime, is one of the best I have read in years, so I was eager to try one of her novels. Reading this on its own, I think I would have thought it pretty good. But after the stories, I was disappointed. It shows similar features, certainly: the lives of artists of all kinds, people reinventing themselves, the passage of time, and the Chicagoland setting. It contains a similar mix of drama, insight, and humor, but it lacks the consistent invention of that extraordinary collection. Strange as it may sound, the stories have a much higher specific gravity than the full novel. Either Makkai has developed enormously in the intervening year, or she is simply better as a short-form writer. 
 The setting is a large mansion in its own estate, about thirty miles north of Chicago, built by a scion of the Devohrs, turn-of-the-century industrialists supposedly on a par with the Morgans or the Fricks. Built in 1900, it becomes an artists' colony in the twenties, then reverts to private occupation. The novel, however, tells the story backwards, beginning in 1999 with the approaching Y2K scare, moving back to 1955 and 1929, and ending with a brief "Prologue" set in 1900. Each section ends by revealing secrets about the past. By moving backwards, Makkai can resolve these enigmas while adding more to them. She also inserts references to things we had already read about but passed over with the lightest shiver of our antennae, so that the novel gains in complexity as we read on. On a technical level, Makkai has constructed the book brilliantly. 
 The trouble is the story is relatively trivial and the characters mostly shallow.* I am always suspicious when a novel by a young author contains such figures as a junior English professor or a writer struggling with writer's block; they are a little too close to home. To her credit, Makkai develops this pair in quite a different direction from what I was expecting, but it is a slow beginning nonetheless, and it was not until the secrets began tumbling out well after page 100 that I was really drawn in. The 1955 section is more concentrated though quietly depressing, as the story of an abusive marriage heading for disaster. The 1929 one, at the heyday of the artists' colony, is a lot more entertaining, but the various artists seemed two-dimensional at best; I never really believed in the creative talent of any of them, in the way that I did with all the artists in the story collection. So this last part was really only worth reading for the elucidation of the remaining secrets. And the biggest secret of all, why the house is haunted by the ghost of its first chatelaine, is something that is only hinted at in the closing Prologue. A sad little secret, had she made me care. 
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 *Doubly unfortunate that it was published only a year or so after Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, whose similarly episodic history of a house near Berlin between the same years becomes a searing indictment of twentieth-century German history. Though quite differently structured, Music for Wartime, with its strong Holocaust echoes and deeper themes, would have been a much stronger comparison to Erpenbeck's masterpiece.