The Haunting

In Greek and Roman myth, rivers serve as the borders between this world and the next. The newly dead are ferried across the River Styx, while purified souls on their way back to Earth line up to drink from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Carol Muske-Dukes’ third novel, “Life After Death,” is set in these watery passageways between two states of being, her dead characters not really dead, her living characters backward-looking, trapped by loss and grief. There is even a literal underworld for these liminal figures to visit, Carver’s Cave (called “House of the Spirits” by the Lakota in the book), a large underground chamber with a lake, located under prehistoric Sioux burial mounds just outside of St. Paul, Minn., where the book is set.

Boyd Shaeffer is a non-practicing physician whose charming, wealthy, feckless husband Russell dies at a moment when she doesn’t love him. Not only does she not love him (their marriage has been eroding for years), she has just told him to die: “I’d prefer you dead. Throw yourself out that window, for God’s sake. Swallow some pills! You think I’m joking?” An alcoholic, Russell had left their 4-year-old daughter Freddy unattended at a park playground. A neighbor eventually took the child home. When Russell appears to take Boyd at her word, dropping dead of a heart attack on a tennis court the next morning, she enters a condition that she self-diagnoses as shock, although it has equal parts of anger and guilt.

Sensing that she never really knew Russell, Boyd begins to sort through her dead husband’s library, reading his marginal notes, his journal fragments and his few mediocre poems. She had never taken his jottings seriously but now suspects that they were left intentionally, as a message to her, a reproach for not returning his extravagant love of her. To complicate matters, Russell insists on hanging around. Freddy sees him several times, concluding that Daddy is stuck underground and needs their help to climb back up to the living. Eventually, Boyd begins to receive spectral visits as well, although at first they make her even more angry.

One of the first people whom Boyd must face in her delayed grief is Will Youngren, the city’s most eligible funeral director. Despite his skill at comforting his bereaved clients, Will is taken aback by Boyd’s unconventional grieving, her reliance on irony. Her speech and manner recall his twin sister, Signe, who died in a sledding accident (an ill-considered act of bravado) when they were 14. Backing Will up against a wall, Boyd quotes Russell’s favorite poet, Keats: “Darkling, I listen and for many a time/I’ve been half in love with easeful Death.” It makes sense to Will that the phrase Boyd comes up with, out of midair, is the inscription he chose for his sister’s headstone.

Fairly soon, Boyd must begin to remind Will that she is not his dead sister. The night of their first dinner out--not a date, exactly, but an opportunity for Boyd to find out more about her husband’s strange death--Will takes her to the underground cave, a place his sister had loved. It was Signe who discovered the secret entrance, a hidden furrow in the earth leading to a tunnel-like passage that opens out into the caves. After an embarrassing delay in finding the cave opening, which he has not visited since childhood--a passage rich with Freudian connotations--Will makes his way inside by lying on his back and shimmying out of sight. Boyd will not follow him.

One sniff of the musty underworld, one sound of water dripping in a high-ceilinged chamber, is enough for her. Later, when Boyd asks Will to bring her back to the cave, this time with Freddy, it is a sign that she accepts her husband’s departure as his own business. And in engaging Boyd, Will regains something of his intimacy with his dead sister and so is able to release Signe to death.

Given the persuasive charms of Muske-Dukes’ prose, which shifts easily between graceful, even showy, concision and the rhythms of everyday speech, it will come as no surprise that she is the author of several books of poetry. From poetry, too, she may have drawn her taste for resonances and correspondences. As with a well-made poem, there are few loose ends in “Life After Death.” There is even a subplot involving life before death, in which Boyd, haunted by a botched abortion during her training (a patient with an unsuspected heart condition, like Russell’s, died on the operating table), must face her own helplessness and resolve to become a doctor again.

One of her first tasks, in this most symmetrical of novels, is to help a desperate young woman end her pregnancy. (The strangest symmetry of “Life After Death” lies just beyond its pages, in the unexpected death, on a tennis court, of Muske-Dukes’ own husband, actor David Dukes, some months after her manuscript was completed.)

Muske-Dukes’ fictional world is as well-ordered as the division of cells, and the result is a beautifully crafted but somewhat chilly novel. Boyd’s recovery is a little too clean, her past troubles too neatly resolved. The reader can sense her turning briskly away from her husband’s death, relieved to be done with the business. The best scenes, however, involve Freddy, whose rationality is still filtered through childhood superstitions, leaving room for the ache and messiness of lasting grief. *