Book review: Apparition & Late Fictions

Published on Friday 19 February 2010 19:14

Apparition & Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch Jonathan Cape, 224pp, £12.99 Review by SUSAN MANSFIELD

A POCKET watch adorns the cover of Thomas Lynch's volume of stories. Even if we didn't know that Lynch is an undertaker by profession, and even without the harbinger implicit in the phrase "late fictions", we know that this book will be, on some level, about death.

Certainly, there are deaths in these stories: parents who die before their time, absent spouses, lost children. But death is not the central drama, and they are not classic tragedies. Death here is, perhaps, death as it is to a funeral director: stripped of its taboos and woven into the fabric of life.

Incredibly, this book of four short stories and a novella is Lynch's first collection of fiction. He has published three collections of poetry (a fourth is due this year) and three volumes of essays, one of which, The Undertaking – Life Studies in the Dismal Trade, was a finalist in the US National Book Awards.

He combines writing with running the family business in Milford, Michigan, where he has been funeral director since 1974. Perhaps this perspective contributes to the measured, unrushed quality of his prose, as if he has allowed each story to take the time it requires to mature.

In "Bloodsport", the protagonist is an undertaker. In middle age, he recalls one of his first funerals, at which he helped a beautiful 15-year-old come to terms with the death of her father. His "appropriate" words and gestures felt superficial, while he struggled to suppress his own attraction for her. Then, five years later, when she is shot by her jealous husband, he can only do what is appropriate: embalm her body and reflect on his own missed opportunities.

Harold Keehn, the protagonist of "Hunter's Moon", is a casket salesman. We meet him in old age on his daily constitutional, a gentle perambulation through a lifetime of recollections in which the names of the casket models come to him as readily as the memories of his three marriages.

Lynch's careful valuing of places and details, of a small life and its disappointments, imbues it with colour and complexity. Some might criticise the stillness of these stories: characters tend to be frozen in a moment of inaction, often looking backwards as if the past had a greater hold on them than the present. But their strength is in contemplation not action.

Danny, in "Catch and Release", is much younger than Harold Keehn, a trout bum on the Pere Marquette who takes a fishing trip with his father's ashes. Like the walk in "Hunter's Moon", the trip provides the story with natural borders, but within it a life unfolds: Danny's choice of the river over his studies, and his father's acceptance of his decision; his anger at his father's death so soon after retirement; the dog whom he refused to euthanise, which confirms the rightness of his decision by its unquestioning love of life.

Lynch's writing extends the same care and deliberation to the minutiae of flies and fishing tackle as to the emotions at the heart of the story. It has the elegance and humanity of a writer like Richard Ford, so much so that the elegance almost becomes a fault: with a couple of notable exceptions, even savage moments become imbued with beauty.

Aisling Black in "Matinee de Septembre" is the most problematic of Lynch's characters. A self-absorbed writer and academic who becomes infatuated with a young Jamaican waitress at a grand Michigan hotel, she has echoes of Aschenbach in Death in Venice. As in that story, one who trades in aesthetics is transformed by an encounter with beauty embodied, yet all this feels somewhat contrived. Set against the background of the credit crunch, it is an ambitious attempt to describe how one cushioned by wealth and privilege comes to realise that she, after all, may be touched by the same unease. But the gently ironic tone Lynch takes to poke fun at Aisling's self-absorption leaves us tempted to deplore her superficiality rather than share her pain.

At the beginning of Apparition, the novella, one fears he's going to do the same with Adrian Littlefield, a former methodist minister whose marriage breaks down, leading him to make his fortune by writing a post-divorce self-help book. We meet him – bestselling author and keynote speaker – setting up trysts with lonely women at a lawyers' convention.

But a day trip to the island which was the scene of his wife's first infidelity opens up a much larger story: of a marriage and its aftermath, and of how grace returned to his life through the unlikely vessels of a drinking, swearing Catholic priest and a babysitter. For all the deaths in this book, the "apparition" at the centre of the story is no ghost but a kind of epiphany, a moment in which the world and the people in it are briefly transformed.

Yet life goes on, and middle age finds wealthy, successful Adrian Littlefield regretting the simpler life that he lost when his marriage ended. This subtlety and complexity is Lynch's great strength, married to the clarity and elegance of his prose, making this beautiful collection one of the highlights of the year so far.