A Beautifully Rendered World About Art and Family

Heather Newton’s new novel, The Puppeteer’s Daughters, is a revelation—a moving, magical and wholly engaging revelation. In the best novels, you meet a character or cast of characters and make certain assumptions about them, but the more time you spend with them, the more those assumptions fall away and the more real, the more complex the characters feel. In other words, they become believable, human.

The Puppeteer’s Daughters is a wonderful example of this. The more we get to know Walter Gray, the master puppeteer, and his daughters, the truer they feel. One of the many things I admire about The Puppeteer’s Daughters is how it’s forever sidestepping the reader’s expectations, keeping us forever on our toes. Like life.

The novel opens in Bevins Estates, a senior living facility, with the 80th birthday celebration of Walter Gray, the renowned puppeteer and creator of Zeno and Friends, who created Gray Steed Puppets, a multimillion-dollar empire which is also celebrating its 35th year. On the surface of it, it appears Walter’s three daughters, each by different mothers and who haven’t seen each other in some time, have come to celebrate with their father. But we discover the more pressing reason, and what Walter himself is unaware of, is because of his worsening dementia, his daughters have come to transfer him from the assisted living wing of Bevins to the skilled nursing section, where he will receive more care.

So it is the crisis of Walter’s failing health that brings his three very different daughters together for the first time in years. The results are touching, funny and often surprising interactions between the sisters, who have experienced their father in different stages of his life and obviously in different stages of their own. The result is a kind of collective portrait of Walter, a reckoning of their famous puppeteer father as a father. The real magic in the novel is how through flashbacks with his daughters and their mothers, we witness Walter come to life in a journey from Walter Gray the famous puppeteer to Walter the father. Newton breathes life into Walter, much in the same way the master manipulator brings his beloved marionettes to life.

As the sisters are moving his things from assisted living, they come upon his will and find an irksome and mean-spirited codicil Walter had written four years earlier, in a fit of anger, when he’d learned that his daughters had put conditions on his driving. Jane, the oldest and most bitter about her childhood with Walter as a struggling artist father, must “create a puppet.” Cora, the youngest who buries herself in her work as head of Gray Steed Puppets, has to “come out from behind the stage to live among humans.” And Rosie, the middle daughter, who weighs 300 pounds, must weigh no more than 200 pounds by the time of Walter’s death.

Walter had known at the time he’d written the codicil that it was spiteful and had told himself he would tear it up the next day but in his dementia had forgotten:

“He put the will away and dragged himself to bed. In the morning he remembered the codicil … but his mind was rotten cloth, that one couldn’t mend without more tearing—new holes opened up where the needle entered. The will with its conditions stayed where he’d filed it. He never thought of it again.”

In addition to the vindictive codicil, there is yet another surprise: at the birthday celebration, an aide, in making conversation, asks Walter if these three daughters are his only children, and out of the blue Walter replies, “No, there’s another one.” At first his declaration is written off to his dementia, but he insists on her existence and shortly after he’s made this announcement, the sisters discover a paternity test among Walter’s papers, throwing the daughters’ worlds into more confusion:

“Once they knew of her, their missing sister hung in their minds like the last note of an unfinished scale.”

Throughout the novel, Newton’s writing often feels poetic, even lyrical, and this line is a lovely example. It also underscores what’s emotionally at stake for these sisters, what they may gain and also what they may lose with the discovery of this sudden sister.

Over the course of the novel, all three sisters begin to think of their father differently, but perhaps the most striking evolution is that of Jane’s, the eldest daughter, who oversees their father’s care. As a child she loved her father’s marionettes and loved to watch him work on them and discovered her own artistic expression through drawing and was quite good at it:

“… With pencil, the contact was direct, and she could make it do her bidding. Looking up she liked the view of her father’s triangular jawbone and the caverns of his nostrils, the way the light from the overhead bulb sifted through his wild eyebrow hairs, his slight triumphant smile as he manipulated his puppets.”

The tenderness of this description suggests the love and closeness she felt toward her father as a girl. But that tenderness gives way to disappointment and bitterness when in eighth grade Jane wins a statewide Scholastic Gold Key for her drawing of Walter rehearsing his marionettes. The awards ceremony is held at The North Carolina Museum of Art. Jane’s mother had been out of town but Walter, who’d promised to attend, never shows up. When Jane arrives back home, she finds her father in the sewing room obliviously working away on his puppets. He’d completely forgotten the ceremony. The effect was profound. Jane went to her room and “cleaned out every spoke of creativity. Paint by numbers kits, bead kits, a potholder loom, her recorder, cloth scraps, needles and thread, journals where she’d tried her hand at teenage poetry. Glue. Her Kodak Instamatic camera … Her beloved charcoal pencil set ….” The next day at school she changed her elective from art to typing and from then on cultivated an aversion if not downright hostility toward art and artists, specifically toward her father, who she grew to think of as self-indulgent and self-absorbed and in some ways never forgave.

But as the novel progresses Jane, in going through her father’s things, discovers some old VHS tapes that their father made years before of his marionette shows as a way to improve them. Jane had never bothered to look at the tapes because she thought of them as just another expression of her father’s obsession with his puppetry. But she finally does view them and discovers something unexpected, something that reveals another side of Walter, the fatherly side:

A puppet stage was set up near the scraggly garden, but the camera wasn’t focused on it. Instead, Jane watched her teenage self help Rosie find Easter eggs. Rosie had blonde curls that later darkened and relaxed. Rosie’s grandmother had dressed her in a frilly white dress with a blue satin sash. Jane’s hair was cut in wings. She was barefoot, wearing a pair of gray Levi cords she remembered buying with her babysitting money. What struck Jane was that her dad was filming her and Rosie. It wasn’t that they wandered into the frame as the camera on a tripod filmed his marionettes. He was looking at them through the viewfinder.

As Jane goes through these tapes she discovers a loving and engaged father she and Rose had long forgotten.

As a reader I always love learning from fiction, and The Puppeteer’s Daughters is steeped in the art of puppetry, especially the art of marionettes.  As a boy Walter learned how to make marionettes from Mr. Svoboda, a kindly old Czech puppet maker, who moved into Walter’s neighborhood and who befriended the boy. Every day after school Walter went over to the old man’s house (“which smelled like stale saltines”) and helped Mr. Svobota, who was having difficulty with detail work on his marionettes, because he could no longer feel his fingertips:

… Walter placed the eye screws where Mr. Svoboda directed. The soldier puppet staring up at him seemed grateful. … (Mr. Svoboda) handed Walter two pieces of wood fastened in a cross. “This we call a control, for controlling the puppet. Can be simple or fancy.” He showed Walter another control that looked like an old-fashioned biplane. “My soldier needs this airplane control, so I can detach the extra leg bar, give him more movement.’”

Walter’s relationship with his marionettes feels intimate, like close friends or, more accurately, extensions of himself, as in the opening scene of the novel when we see Walter writing the vindictive codicil as his most treasured marionette looks on:

This gypsy princess marionette, the first puppet he ever made himself, hung from a hook near his desk where he sometimes manipulated her when mulling a creative problem, using her in the same way some people use worry beads to help themselves think. In the dim light, her pained expression seemed to chide him.    

A profound fatigue overtook him. He was not in control of his girls. They had left him. They were their own people. His angry scribbling only made him feel ashamed.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he told the puppet. “I’ll destroy it when I’m over my snit.”

At one point in the novel Walter imagines hearing Mr. Svoboda’s instructions about working with marionettes:

“On main control, your right finger holds most of the weight. The left hand works the arms and the legs.”

“Don’t restrict with the costume. The best manipulation no good if puppet can’t move inside his clothes.”

“Let audience see the character thinking.

“Audience must believe your character is alive.”

I have no doubt Mr. Svoboda would admire The Puppeteer’s Daughters, a beautifully rendered world about the innerworkings of art and family, a world that in Heather Newton’s hands feels very much alive.