Lorrie Moore’s latest novel is deeply troubling, but also consoling

Sometimes a novel’s means are so strange, however compelling its final effect on the reader, that a straightforward account of it will be most helpful. I’ve read, or part-read, this novel three times now. On the first reading I gave up, shaking my head. On the second I got to the end, but thought it absurdly wilful, self-absorbed and idiosyncratic to the point of whimsy. The third reading – something, after all, must have drawn me back – exerted an appalling power, and I emerged shaken, troubled, but also consoled. Take your pick. This is a book that is going to divide people, and one that can look very different to the same reader in different lights.

It begins with a letter, written in the late 19th century by a woman to her sister. She runs a boarding house, and a handsome stranger is paying her notice. This strand runs through the novel to a climax of great violence, and a rum consideration of the uses people can be put to after death – their ashes strewn on garden paths, their corpses preserved and lugged around the country as a raree-show. Novels that alternate past and present events are commonplace; but this one is striking for the fact that the connection between the manuscript letters and the present-day characters is casual and almost meaningless.

In that present-day narrative, a teacher, Finn, is summoned to his brother’s deathbed in a New York hospice. Finn has lost his job as a result of refusing the advances of the headmaster’s wife. In a chapter of regret and reminiscence, he and his brother Max exchange memories, jokes and observations that need no explanation and aren’t curbed by good taste.