Michael Hartford

Some days on his walk Harold Keehn thought about his wives. Some days it was caskets. Others it was the heartbreaking beauty of the natural world such as he had come to know it.

Apparition and Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch

These four elegiacal stories and one novella are about death, regret, death, loneliness, and death. Set largely in rural Michigan, and peopled by characters who have suffered loss or care for those who have, they have a slow and solemn pace. Lynch tends toward the long line, the slow and stately sentence, amplifying the adagio tempo.

Thomas Lynch is, not surprisingly, a funeral director by day; two of the stories–”Hunter’s Moon” and “Bloodsport”–are very explicitly about the business of burying, with much rumination about the changes in casket design over the last quarter century and the work of laying out a body for viewing and burial. And the stories that aren’t about funeral directors or casket salesmen have the disposition of remains as a key touchstone: a son takes his father’s ashes on a fishing trip, and a poet’s widow reflects on a stillbirth and how to care for her husband’s literary reputation. Though the novella, “Apparition,” isn’t so clearly about death, it is very much about loss, following a young pastoral assistant’s transformation from minister to self-help guru by way of infidelity and the collapse of his marriage.

Lynch works very successfully with time in these stories, moving deftly between the present and the past. The present action is largely within the characters’ heads; the real action occurs in the past, and in the way the past becomes reshaped in reflection. The stories unfold slowly and gracefully, and resolve with a sense of acceptance, if sometimes tinged with resignation. These are very grown-up stories, not unlike Thomas Williams’ Leah New Hampshire or William Kittredge’s collections, and put the reader in a reflective mood.