Trying not to be cranky, but...

Trying not to be cranky about "Lark & Termite," which has many strengths and has been incredibly well-reviewed, but honestly when a writer introduces supernatural elements 3/4 of the way through her novel, don't you sense someone fishing for a way out of a jam? Not that I was surprised - as noted in an earlier post, I could guess that the character Stample was real only to Lark (and to Termite?). What are we to make of a novel, one of whose strengths is its attention to the ordinary lives of working class Americans in a small city, when it becomes unmoored from reality? Not just the ghost, but the behavior of the characters: A flood is roaring through the city, sweeping up everything, rising toward the roofbeams, rats floating around, and the main character sits blithely in her attic rummaging through boxes of her late mother's possessions? Isn't she afraid? Wouldn't she do something? (The idea of the discovering boxes that contain the past history of an absent character is a rather creaky and improbably plot device unless handled deftly, as in the TV series Mad Men.) As noted previously, this is a very "cool" novel, but the torpor of the main characters strains credulity. BTW: anyone wanna take bets on whether Lark's mother is really dead? Not that there's not, at last, some action going - cross-town, where Lark's aunt/guardian, Nonie, finally has enough of the termagant Gladdie's harangues and, in a struggle, Gladdie falls down the cellar stairs and, perhaps, dies - and Nonie leaves her there. We'll see how that plays out. It's very difficult to manage a novel with alternating character point of view unless every alternation adds something to our knowledge, but too often in Lark & Termite we go over familiar material multiple times: a very writerly device, but not one that draws in readers, or at least it doesn't draw in me.