At the conclusion of The Qualities of Wood, Mary Vensel White's first novel, the reader might be tempted to recall a similar literary mystery, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. It, too, explores a relationship and a woman's disappearance. It, too, is an ominous and psychological novel that manages both artful prose and an eerie plot.
In the case of The Qualities of Wood, the novel's most interesting facets are those it doesn't share with its closest literary neighbors. Here, there are only a few hair-raising moments; instead, White explores the less terrifying but more intricate terrain of human interaction. Her focus remains on Vivian, a recent transplant to the tiny Midwestern town where she and her husband inherited his grandmother's old house. White's prose is, above anything else, atmospheric. Well-placed details like the faded yellow of the kitchen cabinets or the boxes of miscellany in the attic make the old house a place that both Vivian and the reader inhabit for the duration of the book, and the tall prairie grasses that border the woods beyond are as tangible as they are foreboding.
The cast of characters is also richly imagined: there's Vivian's brooding mystery-writer husband, Nowell, and his brawny, underachieving younger brother, Lonnie, who descends on the house midway through their stay with his new wife, Dot. Through their beer cans, barbecues, banter and the information they withhold, the reader learns to navigate these tangled histories and follows Vivian as she pulls at the threads of her husband's secrets, unraveling them one by one. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer and bookseller at Flyleaf Books