It’s been a while since I did a book review, so here goes: Katy Hays’ The Cloisters. This latest entry in would-be successors to The Secret History is a dark academia murder mystery set at The Cloisters, a real museum in New York City dedicated to medieval art.
I can’t separate this book from my feelings about the real Cloisters, which has always been a very special place to me, with great personal and even spiritual meaning. The book reduces this majestic setting to the backdrop of tawdry and highly implausible intrigue that unfolds between Ann Stilwell, (a brilliant grad student from the sticks of Washington state who lands an internship in the research department), and three of her co-workers: Rachel Mondray (gorgeous, rich), Patrick Roland (handsome, rich), and Leo the gardener (bad boy, poor).
There’s a lot going on here: Ann discovers and decodes an ancient deck of tarot cards that backs up some important research of Patrick’s. Rachel conspires with Ann to keep this from Patrick so they can claim the discovery as their own. At the same time, Ann is being lured into the mysticism of tarot and its divination powers -- something Patrick was also obsessed with. She’s also being drawn into Rachel’s luxurious heiress lifestyle. Patrick and Rachel are having sex. Ann and Leo are having sex. Rachel and Leo were having sex. Leo is stealing minor artifacts from the museum and fencing them through a disreputable antiques dealer. Rachel may have murdered her college roommate...and her parents. Patrick is doing ritualistic tarot card readings at the museum at night. Ann has some kind of dark secret in her past, connected to her father’s death. Then they all take some hallucinatory herbs (supplied by Leo from the Cloisters’ garden) and Patrick dies from an apparent overdose. The police immediately and unbelievably label it murder, and then proceed to investigate it as no real cops (I hope) ever would---jumping to conclusions, not following up on glaringly suspicious behavior, etc.
All of this is piled on so fast and furious that there’s no time to develop the kind of haunting atmosphere and tangled relationships that this story cries out for. The book is just too short. Katy Hays had a good idea and some genuinely interesting twists, but it’s all so rushed that you’re left feeling nothing. There’s no sense of mystery, just a lot of foreboding, laid on thick. There’s sex, but no sensuality. The narrator, Ann, is so flat that she wanders through the story with almost no reaction to anything. I think she’s supposed to be a classic unreliable narrator, but she’s our gatekeeper for this story and it’s a problem that she is so closed-off and devoid of emotion.
There’s some gross stuff in here too: Leo’s conduct towards Ann is textbook sexual harassment that gets hand-waved because he’s hot and Ann is attracted to him. He continues to be an awful creep throughout the book. Frankly, no reputable workplace, especially not a world-renowned museum, would tolerate the behavior these characters indulge in on the job. I suffered a lot of second-hand embarrassment for everyone at the real Cloisters for having their workplace and their work parodied by this wildly fictitious potboiler of a story. And it kind of depresses me to think of tourists visiting such a beloved place just because it’s the setting for this goofy book. I wish that Hays had fictionalized The Cloisters the way Donna Tartt fictionalized Bennington into Hampden. I’m just going to have to purge the memory of this novel before I visit the place again, because it’s just too...bleh. No.
It’s a quick read if you want something for the beach or a long flight, but it’s ultimately disappointing and a little bit off-putting.