June 22, 2001:

Life After Death

A Novel

by Carol Muske-Dukes

Random House, 275 pp., $23.95

Carol Muske-Duke's third novel (she is also well-known as the author of six books of poetry) takes an unusually composed look at death -- composed both in the sense of being calm and unsentimental, and also as in a salade composée: an aesthetically driven arrangement of distinct ingredients. It is as if the events surrounding the death of Russell Schaefer are felt and seen from a slight distance. But given the luridness that might ordinarily attend the story of the sudden death of a young, wealthy husband and father, the subtlety of the book is remarkable.

Boyd Schaefer, the dead man's wife, has the very unsettling experience of having her last words to her alcoholic poet husband turn out to have been "Do me a favor, Russell. Die." Her rage is perfectly understandable: The man abandoned their 4-year-old daughter in a park while he went to get a drink. Someone else brought little Freddy home. And Russell keeps insisting he got stuck inside a statue of Sneezy while playing hide'n'seek.

Unfortunately, Russell does die, the very next morning, plunging Boyd into widowhood with an unusually heavy burden of guilt and doubt. Russell's death looks nothing like a suicide -- and yet Boyd is sure there is more to it than meets the eye.

The story's elegant third-person narration allows us to view preceding and ensuing events from varying perspectives. One of the most important is that of Will Youngren, the local funeral director, who develops a instant crush on Boyd when she comes to consult him about what to read at the funeral. (Keats; "Bright Star.") Through his eyes, we learn to appreciate her: a beautiful, ironic, extremely well-educated woman, a doctor with an M.D. she has never used due to an unlucky tragedy during her training.

Another standpoint is provided by Gerda, Russell's mother and a pillar of their Minnesota community. Boyd has married into the Schaefer family's money and social leadership, but it does not come naturally to her. And her instinctive, intimate mothering of Freddy is played against Gerda's more staid grandmothering. Boyd does things like help Freddy act out marital spats with her dollhouse figures while Gerda reads to the little girl from "The Colonial Flower Book." But as we learn more about of the truth about Russell, we learn more about Gerda too.

Many topics that share a bed with death run through this book. Among its considerations are birth, abortion, the death of babies, the way children understand death, how grief unfolds in our lives over the short and long term, the possibility that a spirit persists after death (never fully dismissed) and most thoroughly, mortuary and funereal practices. The management of death, from the handling of the bereaved to the minute details of the preparation of the corpse, are metaphors for what the book itself is about. The abortion material seemed to me the least smoothly integrated, though I admired the author's intention in working with it.

That Muske-Dukes is primarily known as a poet announces itself on the first page: "It had been a hot August day. Now it was one of those white nights peculiar to Minnesota and other Northern states: late-season evenings when the summer dark changed texture and the night sky grew light again. Boyd was thinking about how migrating birds died because of these white nights -- they thought it was day again and kept flying long past exhaustion, long past the time of safe landings, instinct urging them onward, till they fell. She had read about these birds in one of Russell's poems; now she was wondering if he had made them up."

The final detail shows that the poet is a novelist as well, weaving through the skeins of information that will drive her plot. Unraveling the story of Russell's life and death is one of the most interesting parts of it. He is expansive, creative, imprecise, talented, less than fully honest or fully lovable, though honesty and lovability are central to his persona. He leaves his wife a series of notes stuck in the leaves and written in the margins of books. One says, in part, "I like the truth: how we never, our whole lives, understand another being." Though he dies in a prologue and is absent from the rest of the action, he is perhaps the most vibrant character in the novel.

The aim of this book is an ambitious one: to put death in its place. Muske-Dukes takes an impressive shot at the task.

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Marion Winik's book Rules for the Unruly: Living an Unconventional Life was published this spring.