Lorrie Moore’s fabulously strange new novel is saturated in grief and reads like a response to the pandemic, during which this towering American author, known for her masterful short stories, lost her father. Her first novel since 2009 reflects a different meaning and a different America with each twist of the light. The plot is unhinged – a man whose brother is dying in a hospice is driving halfway across the country with the reanimated body of his recently suicided ex-girlfriend. Punctuating his story are letters from a woman in the Confederate South to her dead sister concerning her eccentric lodger, whom we infer is John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. The supernatural atmospherics are a vehicle for Moore’s lyricism and merciless wit. This is an elegiac state-of-the-nation novel in the most oblique way, quivering with the unquiet ghosts of America’s inglorious past.
Photograph Basso Cannarsa/Opale/Alamy
