The History of Sound has a sense of the ephemeral and the historical, of continuity and rupture. It creates a present perpetually haunted by unintelligible echoes of the past, siren calls of blighted archives.

The stories are spread over some three centuries of New England history, from the colonial era to the recent past, in no particular chronological order. Characters find haphazard artefacts and documents from a forgotten past–wax cylinders, whale-bone dildos, newspapers, court records–and often fail to obtain any whole truth from them. Mysterious deaths go unexplained, hoaxes pass as truth. Shattuck interspeeds his characters’ mistaken attempts at recovering the past with historical testimonies, but the two never meet. And of course, crucial moments are left out of the archive; elucidation repeatedly proves impossible; Shattuck seems intent on showing the ephemerality and ineffability of historical truth.

There is, in the end, no resolution to most stories, which fizzle out with a sense of unease, soft bafflement or just unadulterated New Englandness. Characters, plot points, themes run aground and shore up in different stories, without any care for straight narrative progression or feeling of fulfillment.

Some are introduced for no clear reason, like ghosts appearing of their own volition and on their own impenetrable terms, just to give an even weirder texture to this gently discombobulated universe. The society of The History of Sound is a network of hauntings. Characters from the past echo characters of the present; joys and miseries follow a circular current; yesteryear’s deaths seem to cause today’s loneliness.

Before the stories begin, Shattuck signals that his collection follows the pattern of a hook-and-chain song, very popular in 18th-century New England: A BB CC DD EE FF A. And indeed, the stories seem to walk in pairs, but quietly, like old couples who no longer need to hold hands to feel close. The collection has, in a sense, too much coherence not to feel like an experimental regionalist novel. Lovers of The Country of the Pointed Firs will feel that they step into familiar territory when opening Shattuck’s book.

When I read The History of Sound, I heard the perfect siren call of Jewett and New England regionalism. And, also, something stranger and yet even more exquisite: the imp of time and history.