Sara Sligar begins her second novel, Vantage Point, in the depths of the ocean, as a character is in the middle of drowning. It’s a warning that we have entered a sinister territory. Then the scene shifts to land, where we meet siblings Teddy and Clara Wieland. Teddy, the older, appears to be the voice of responsibility; he became his sister’s guardian after their parents died. Clara has been in and out of eating disorder rehabs and has a history of drug use and hallucinations. The pair are flush with family money and occupy an outrageous estate on a secluded island off the coast of Maine.
But a lurking evil has found them even there.
This is the so-called Wieland curse, which Sligar explicates by intercutting the chapters of her novel with details from a Wikipedia-style page about the family’s travails. Their history is Kennedyesque, not least in the gruesome ways various Wielands have died violent, accidental deaths: by horse trampling, by bear attack, by candlestick stabbing, by a tumble from a Titanic lifeboat. Clara believes her parents also fell prey to the curse; they were swept into the ocean by a rogue wave and crushed against the cliffs. At the time, Clara had been photographing them.
Capitalizing on his family name, Teddy has launched a U.S. Senate run, with the active participation of his wife (and Clara’s best friend), Jess. Then, in the midst of the campaign, a video of Clara—tattooed and emaciated—spreads online. She’s having sex with a man she can’t remember, in a room she can’t recall. Another video appears shortly thereafter, and another.
This, Clara concludes, is the curse coming to get her. She plunges into paranoia and bulimia. But she also begins an investigation and finds, to her shock, that she is a victim of deepfake pornography. Nonetheless, the impact of the videos is already so great that it doesn’t matter whether they’re real or not.
Like the siblings, Jess grew up on the island—but in much different circumstances. Her mother cleaned homes for the wealthy families; Jess waited tables and put herself through college on loans and scholarships. After she and Clara found each other, they developed an inseparable coexistence. Clara makes Jess brave; Jess provides Clara with stability and comfort. Yet as they age, Jess, more so than Clara, can’t help but face the facts.
“She let their money run through her like water,” she reflects of Clara. “I tried not to resent it, but sometimes, the waste was all I could see.… The gulf between us widened, bit by bit.”
Jess and Teddy got together after Clara was hospitalized. A piece of Jess wonders, however, whether she ended up with the wrong sibling, whether she and Clara were meant to be together. Clara’s obsessive self-destruction, though, has never allowed the women space to become anything other than friends.
The videos make Clara wild and unpredictable. She begins to have visions of her family, including her dead parents. Sligar raises the tension by alternating points of view between Clara and Jess. Only after I finished reading the book did I realize there were no chapters narrated by Teddy. Instead, the novel belongs to the women. We learn about their love, their loyalties, the traumas both are desperate to outrun.
Eventually, Clara begins to grasp some kind of explanation for what is happening, although it’s nearly unbelievable. But this is where the book slows—by requiring us to buy into a narrative about a technology so advanced, and its targets so oblivious, that it could tempt them into believing what is not there. Here, Sligar pushes a bit too far, relying on fiction to account for lapses in technical grounding. Clara, with her history of visions and mental illness, might be fooled, but Jess and Teddy? That would be a different matter altogether.
Still, if we are willing to buy in, we might appreciate Sligar’s vision of a reality that propels us faster than our rationality can understand. Deepfake pornography invades privacy, AI accelerates into undetectability, and the lines between what is real and what is manufactured become increasingly blurred. Money makes Jess and Clara experience life differently than the rest of us, as do grief and loss.
Who is to say that the truth is not malleable as well? If an illusion elicits a fatal reaction, does that make it more real?•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
