How Will She Pull It Together? 
 I went to bed last night with only the last chapter of Lydia Millet's novel left to read. Waking early this morning, I lay in bed thinking of the book's two threads--themes that you might have thought incompatible rather than intertwined or twinned--and wondering how on earth she was going to resolve even one of them in a mere 30 pages, let alone pull them both together. It occurred to me that beginning my review at this point might be an excellent way of showing both the strengths and weaknesses of the book--though the fact I feel uninvolved enough to postpone finding out how it ends is surely pretty strong evidence of the latter. 
 This could be a pretty good domestic thriller of the kind that has become quite popular recently. Anna, the first-person narrator, is the mother of a six-year-old daughter Lena. They are in Maine, hiding in an out-of-season motel, in flight from Anna's husband, Ned, an Alaska businessman who originally wanted to abort the child and has little time for either mother or daughter. But now Ned is running for office and needs wife and child for his Family Values campaign. Well funded by a conservative PAC, he will stop at nothing to get Anna and Lena back as immaculate props in the background of his professionally choreographed photo-ops. And as the tension ratchets up slowly but surely, we begin to see that Ned's reach is long, his powers of surveillance uncanny, and his methods potentially lethal. 
 The opening chapters of the novel, however, develop in a different direction entirely. As soon as Lena is born, Anna begins hearing voices, apparently coming from the child, though not uttered through her lips. The voices speak mainly in foreign languages or are unintelligible, but there are occasional phrases in English. The situation changes as Lena grows older, but Anna never loses the sense of being different from normal people. The Maine motel begins to feel like a Stephen King set, slowly filling with other out-of-season visitors with mysterious reasons for being there; are they a support group for Anna, or something altogether more sinister? As Anna tries to research her situation online, she comes across weird theories about the primal voice that links all things. New Age gobbledygook. What could have been a very unusual element in the right hands instead turns into a thread of lunatic fantasy that increasingly alienated me from the thriller story, and reduced its all-too-real threat. 
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 At this point, I was at four stars for the thriller aspect of the novel, pulled down to three by that inane pseudo-philosophy. But then came the final chapter. All I can say is that it works out in the worst possible way for both threads, wafting off into utter cloud-cuckoo-land with the paranormal one and abrupt and implausible for the thriller. Even one star now seems too much.