Book Review
Brianna Wilson
The Spoil by Maile Chapman Graywolf, 2026.
Maile Chapman’s new novel The Spoil focuses on the perspective of Mandy Vandervelden, a middle-aged woman with rampant ADHD living in Las Vegas and caring for her mother, Jandine, during her terminal plunge into Alzheimer’s. Chapman writes beautifully about the way grief forces its way into every living cell, the way grief never truly dissipates. The whole novel, while full of heartache and terror and fear and love and hatred and unanswered questions, largely revolves around how the loss of Jandine affects Mandy, and the way Jandine’s mind seems to dissolve from within. Early in the novel, Mandy reflects on Jandine’s passing and the paradox of how a disease that progresses slowly cannot escape the immediacy of death: I believed she would be whole again after everything, somehow. But until that moment I didn’t know how much I had believed that I would see her again here. In this life. As if she’d been suspended in the air on a flight she’d boarded years ago, and she’d only been stuck in transit, held up somewhere because of this illness. And now it had run its course, but she was gone.
The Spoil itself is reminiscent of dementia in its style and structure. As the salient feature of our first-person narrator, Mandy’s ADHD keeps the reader vigilant throughout the novel through her sporadic thoughts and loss of focus. The writing continuously jumps back and forth from past to present with very
little indication of change–just like Mandy’s mind. As the novel progresses, the reader can see Mandy’s disorder start to include common symptoms of dementia similar to what her mother experienced. Significant disorientation leads to lost thoughts, maddening forgetfulness, second-guessings, and unavoidable feelings of self-doubt. Conversations and time jumps become more confusing, more interactive, more complex as the story progresses. Mandy recognizes this turbulence as well.
About halfway through the novel Mandy, having proven herself a strong caretaker, agrees to watch over a strange and eccentric house guest as he prepares for a life-changing surgery. He is unpredictable in his nature, bizarre in his musings, and increasingly insidious in his syntax. He tries desperately to make Mandy comprehend the significance of his meaningless rants, but she only becomes more perplexed and frustrated as the surgery creeps closer. After some of these interactions, she begins to question the sanity of her house guest and her general surroundings:
What happened to the interviewing, the research? What would I think of so much vagueness coupled with such peculiar specificity under these circumstances? But of course there are no other circumstances. Just these.
The novel is full of metaphors and beautifully written prose that helps the reader understand the way Mandy’s mind works: “vagueness coupled with such peculiar specificity.” Chapman is able to provide both vagueness and specificity throughout the novel due to the quantity of experience and study that went into its creation, which she addresses in her the back of the book in
A Note on Sources. In addition to the historical and scientific references throughout the book, the reader is forced to reckon with the fact that grief of this magnitude cannot be fabricated. In her Acknowledgements, Chapman notes that she was a caregiver
herself. The reader can feel the effects of despair from her writing leak into their own experiences.
Expertly intertwined with grief is the supernatural element of the story that kept me alert and on edge throughout. During her time caring for her mother and after her death, Mandy is continuously haunted by something she cannot explain–something that has followed her since childhood, from her grandmother’s crawl space to the Tacoma basement of her parent’s house to her over-stuffed duplex in Nevada. Mandy’s own memories of the unexplainable, foreboding presence are scattered and often dismissed by her younger, obtrusive stepbrother, Jeff. But regardless of her inability to pin down the feeling, Mandy inherently and subconsciously understands that something is not right. Can Mandy’s supernatural experiences be illuminated by her incoherent house guest? It is this background horror and inherent disorientation that lurks around every corner coupled with dementia’s curse of reality loss that drives the atmosphere of this thriller. Even more terrifying? The horror is based in science.
A significant portion of Mandy’s house guest’s ramblings are an attempt to impress an understanding of marine biology and a version of physical cosmology on his host. This strange coupling of complicated concepts, explained by a man who has seemingly lost touch with reality, lead to some magnificent theories on the supernatural consequences of an interuniversal netting:
‘Those forams,’ he says. ‘Those forams must have constructed billions of physical spaces until one or more of them found the sacred geometry capable of catching and holding the impossible. Something from the nonluminous universe. A flash of true darkness.’
To grasp the magnitude of a slow-burn ambiguous revelation like this, you have to read the story.
It’s been fifteen years since Maile Chapman’s debut, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, leaving her readers to wonder what, if anything, Chapman has been up to. At 529 pages, The Spoil is a stunning answer, a literary jewel. Its unique weaving of grief, dementia, and the supernatural braid a dense story that I cannot stop thinking about. It almost feels as if it will take multiple passes to discover details I missed the first time around; already, I am ready to read it again.