Reviewers seem a bit confused by Lorrie Moore’s new novel about love after death. Most exude this weird kind of shock that Moore could write something so, um, well…trite. And icky. But it’s good! They all say. It’s better than all the other crap out there. She’ll write something better soon.

Anyway, every review covers the surface action well, so I won’t get too far into that. History teacher’s brother is dying, while his ex-girlfriend is suicidal, then dead, then sort of alive again, sort of a tree, and off the two of them go, on an obliquely adventurous/fantastic/surreal “road trip” that hugs the Mason Dixon line, as her dead body decays. That is indeed what happens.

And the epistolary framing provided by the out-of-time innkeeper, Libby, does indeed send us into brief moments of literary splendor, with Moore kind of showing off (with purpose) in the form of Libby’s well-executed Cormac McCarthy-style liturgical drawl. It’s good stuff, I agree.

But after auditing many reviews, I find only a few writing on this novel have touched on the main time-traveling conspiracy theory threading its way through this doube narrative.

And folks stumble on the bad jokes, the bad puns, the bad one-liners, homophones, narrow cultural references that fall short—the desperation humor, you might call it, that bobs and weaves its way all through this short American lamentation on four wheels. 

Why are they doing that? Why doesn’t Lily (the too-perfect name —the “life” of death) know more about death, or even that she’s quite dead? Why must Finn keep at her, keep hounding her on the question of just how dead she is? 

“Maybe it’s a spectrum,” she offers. Indeed, maybe it is, in some kind of deaths. Maybe it’s slower, less absolute right away, less tangible and solid. More a dying than a death.

And what of this innkeeper? What is her role? Why do Finn and Lily end up at her broken down boarding house, where her ghost surely resides in the form of her bound letters to her dead sister—just as Finn’s brother is about to become his own ghost. What is in this parallel structure to make it mean something?

My key to this minor enigma can be found in some of the recurring imagery itself — Lily’s decay, a vehicle on the road to nowhere, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, the Mason/Dixon, secessionists, conspiracy theories, Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and skies that offer patterns significant to others but, we are told more than once, not to Finn, who doesn’t understand how anyone sees anything in the constellations. 

And what does Finn say more than once, amid what appears to be a salad of jumbled, barely appropriate cultural references uttered by each of them seemingly without willing it (the pair are constantly self-critiquing each other’s prowess at this, to be fair):

There are no more Rice Krispies.

Here, you must be not only a cultural historian but one of a certain age — Lorrie Moore’s age — to even get the joke at all. And if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you. Yes, the book is about loss. Of course it is. But it’s more than that.

But that’s the idea. I feel like you can read this book two ways (at least) — as someone ignorant of history (or who conflates history with its attendant popular conspiracy theories and various tv shows about history) or someone who knows history. If you’re the former, you will be confused and perplexed (kind of like Finn and some of these reviewers) by this narrative’s sort of half-knowledge of history mixed with commercial fodder gleaned from a lifetime of television exposure, shot through with a sepia-toned conspiracy theory born in 1865 and still living today. For a quick shorthand, you can think of what Don DeLillo was trying to do (and did) in his 1985 novel White Noise. It’s part of what Moore is doing here – throwing us off balance with our own fractured culture.

But if you’re the latter, you see the thread Moore is weaving, from the political theater of 2016 to the theater (Ford’s) of 1865. There is no character more salient to the post-2016 American condition than a spoiled rich charlatan—a famous con man wrapped up in an overly coiffed disguise of himself that exudes charming bravado, but who in his nihilistic solipsism will threaten the stability of a nation, perhaps the world. 

And that man was John Wilkes Booth. Or was it Abraham Lincoln? 

You see? If we go back to 1865* we find a familiar world, with familiar actors, where history has not yet finished the chapter but soon will. A disgruntled and just-defeated South, where the president is despised as a tyrant, had nurtured the famous Booth and then birthed, in the final hours, the fanatic Booth, who goes on to carry out the vengeance their own hearts nurtured at home. 

Booth was famous, you know, on both sides of the Mason/Dixon. He was beloved in Maryland and the greater South for his acting talents and his place in the impressive Booth family. He lived a life of celebrity, ease, and wealth. Yet something in him transformed him into the assassin he became. That something was the Union’s victory, and specifically Abraham Lincoln.

We know his story too, basically. He shot Lincoln, then got away to a barn somewhere after hurting his leg (either from jumping onto the Ford’s Theater stage or later when his getaway horse fell on him, it’s not known). The authorities found him there, besieged the barn—and then the story gets murky. Suffice to say, many believed he got away that night, and some other poor soul was shot in that burning barn.

Now let’s look again at Jack, the southern dandy described with such detail by landlady Libby. He knows Shakespeare, he has grandiose ways, mutton chops, and flashy clothes (along with a trunk full of wigs, tights of all variety, and several shining swords). He winks and hints cryptically to Libby regarding secessionists in the area. Most tellingly, he has a cork leg–“from the secesh, he says”. Oh, and he’s a real jerk to women. Libby describes him often, as in:

“Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can recite bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans (note: whose poetry runs from kitchy patriotic themes to the suicide of women) … His mustache is black and thick as a broom bristle and the words come flying out of it like the lines of a play in a theatre on fire…”

Of course, that would all add up to just a hunch if not for the curiosity seeker who comes calling at the boarding house asking for Jack’s body (Jack is traditionally a nickname for John, by the way). His name is Phineas Bates, and Libby surmises that he wants the body to mummify it, and to then cart it around the country as a sideshow curiosity. Why does Libby think this?

Because it’s what happened. Sort of. The controversy still swirling around John Wilkes Booth’s death at the turn of the century prompted one Finis L. Bates to write Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, a bestseller contending that a Booth look-alike was mistakenly killed at the Garrett farm while Booth eluded his pursuers until he committed suicide in 1903 in Enid, Oklahoma. Later, Bates went so far as to exhibit what he claimed was Booth’s embalmed body at carnival shows. 

Finn mentions the controversy and mystery of the barn episode to Lily, with Booth’s possible escape part of the wider web of conspiracy theories in which he’s interested (including UFOs and the possibility that the moon landing was faked to reach Kennedy’s arbitrary deadline).

All subsequent attempts, by both the Booth family and researchers, to exhume the body buried in John Wilkes Booth’s grave have been rejected by the authorities based on what they call the “unreliability” of Bates’ story.

So Finn interprets this as perhaps we all should: the bottom line is that this is a story known to history, but without evidence, because those in charge don’t want to see it.

Still, given all that, what is Moore’s point in resurrecting (if you will) this old saw and then burying it in a story about lovers on the run? 

It may be helpful to examine the mind of Booth a little more carefully. Here he is in a letter from January 1865:

I know how foolish I shall be deemed for undertaking such a step as this, where, on one side, I have many friends and everything to make me happy … to give up all … seems insane; but God is my judge. I love justice more than I do a country that disowns it, more than fame or wealth.

Does that bullshit sound familiar at all? Or how about this:

I have ever held the South was right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln, four years ago, spoke plainly war upon Southern rights and institutions. …And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution, I for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation.

Feelings like this transformed Abraham Lincoln into a tyrant and violence into the only solution among people like Booth. In other words, the destruction of their “way of life” (which was a way to death for Black people) was tantamount to genocide and a call for the very civil war that had then lain waste to their society. They were defeated, yes. But in many Southern homes, for years afterward, proud portraits of John Wilkes Booth were displayed in the parlor. 

And in Moore’s telling, he struts around a Chattanooga boarding house in a continuation of his self-important drama, the stage play of the brave patriot who brought down a tyrant and lived to tell the tale — even after his celebrated death.

Perhaps he really did get away, with help from sympathizers, in the same way he got to that barn after shooting the president in the middle of Washington, DC. Finn points out that Lincoln’s personal guard was conveniently off drinking beer when Booth pulled the trigger, and that a lot of other folks were conveniently placed around the area. Because we’re not allowed to find out who’s in that grave, we will never know if Booth got away. But we know there were folks positioned to help him, right there in Washington.

The idea was to re-charge the war by decapitating the Union government. A plan worthy of Q-anon.

It was a slow dying. Their ideals stayed the same, or maybe even hardened a bit, like pre-rigormortis of the soul. They are still dying, and dying hard. Will they ever die? Whom do we ask?

Like the protest sign carried by a character living in a tent shown on the television in Max’s hospice room early in the novel, we can all say it to them, those who want to start it all over and maybe win it this time, against logic and history, who want to “take their country back” from no one they can name—because really, they want to resurrect another country that’s dead and doesn’t know it:

We are not homeless. This is our home.

What is death really, and what will be dying this time around the horn? Is it already dying? Is it dead? Can we be sure? Lorrie Moore probably isn’t any happier than I am about a curiosity that can seek but only find the lack of an answer—an answer we cannot know yet, and may never know, like the slipping patient his time of death. So we make dumb jokes and wait, like people in the hospice room do, step out for hot drinks, hoping it won’t be as bad as it feels like it’s going to be. Hoping at least there will be some finality, sometime soon, to whatever is dying. Hoping–even better–that something will happen to undo all this. Someday soon.

No more Rice Krispies.

Hope floats around our grief—as Moore describes it, like a soap bubble, its swirling colors ready to pop into nothingness—hope that it never happens to us. To me. To all of us at once.

But as Finn finally realizes, and as the young African assistant to his dying brother Max already knew, one must make one’s peace with death early and often. Because it’s everywhere, all at once. It never goes away. It is as relentless as life.

So if you read this book and, as you read, you get more comfortable with Lilly’s paper-like skin, her lavender lips, the Venetian blinds of her ribs, the sag of her bloated organs—you’re getting some of it. The rest is the hard part. None of us really wants to know or believe it—this—can end, just like anyone who has ever faced the possibility of a generalized loss of everything. I know I don’t. But as our two star-crossed lovers have shown, as much as Finn wanted their story to end differently, to never end: you can’t outrun the fate awaiting all motions of the clock, not even if you drive all night until the sky is no longer the night sky but one full of Van Gogh’s swirling storms.

And anyway, you just might be driving in the wrong direction.

________________________________________

*Because this stuff is unmentionable, right? Like it never happened. Or here we go with the “Trump derangement syndrome” and the death threats. Nobody I know talks about our biggest problem in nearly a century.