Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories

The fourth "by Thomas Lynch" in my library, by the undertaker who writes, whose clients are fortunate if he buries them with the same quality of work with which he puts words to paper. The story 'Matinee de Septembre' is wonderfully crafted. In 'Catch and Release,' when Danny went to his knees for the first time since his father's death, I was there, experiencing again my emotions after my own father's death. Like Harold in 'Hunter's Moon,' I also love "the long hours alone in the carand the vacant landscape and the open roads." In 'Catch and Release,' Lynch writes that "we must tolerate some imperfections in the ones we love." I only hope those who love me take those words to heart.

This is an amazing first attempt at fiction. We've read the other works of Thomas Lynch (all non-fiction & poetry), and the author has a true gift. We await his next attempt. . .

Thomas Lynch is one of those writers who have always had another career besides writing. Most of us do, but often, the successful ones, like Lynch, don't. There are a few famous exceptions. T. S. Eliot, for instance, was a book publisher. That's interesting, but it also relates to his work as a writer. More intriguing are those like the poet Wallace Stevens, who was a lawyer for an insurance company. Or William Carlos Williams, another of America's great modernist poets, who was also a pediatrician. Lynch, 58, is an undertaker. This wouldn't seem to be an occupation that draws the same sort of person as does the work of writing poetry and fiction, but Lynch has found his way in all of these things and with tremendous results. It turns out that the funeral home business, which he's run in a small town in Michigan for decades, has provided a wealth of insight into death - and that's what he writes best about. Death is the primary subject of this new collection of stories, just as it was of his 1997 book of essays, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, which won Lynch a bunch of awards and recognition, including the American Book Award. Apparition and Late Fictions is not only about death, but about missing children, former spouses, dogs (lots of dogs), AA meetings, loss, and redemption. One story tells of a widower who has survived three marriages and made a bundle of mistakes in each of them. The man is a salesman for a casket company. In another, the first story in the collection called "Catch and Release," Danny, a fly-fishing guide in western Michigan, takes a thermos bottle with his father's ashes out on his drift boat one afternoon. As he remembers his father, he fishes, and slowly distributes the ashes into the water that the two of them had shared. It's clear that Lynch knows how to fly-fish, and that he's also a poet, in passages such as this one: "He could feel the split shot in the gravel at the top of the hole, and could feel it fall into the deeper run, and watched the loop in his line straighten in the current and held the rod out in front of him as the line moved through the water." He also writes beautifully about human bodies, and the ways in which we think about our bodies. In one story, the narrator reflects on a young woman's feelings of happiness and how they relate to her "graceful body and eyes like the blue of the indigo bunting." In another, a lithe, young intellectual on a cross-Atlantic flight is appreciating the male flight attendant, whom she assumes, to her disappointment, to be gay: "She could see that he paid attention to his body hair and the press of his trousers. But if he weren't [gay], she wondered, which of her parts would his hands first go to?" I suspect that these insights come from Lynch's lifetime of talking with family members about how to best present their loved-ones for viewing in a casket. But Lynch is at his very best when he moves from death back to life, and when he shows us h

An appealing and empathetic collection of tales that delves into human motivations and crises without lurid sensationalism. Tactful and tasteful. Presents in-depth and moving accounts of people that we learn to care about--written with a gentle touch that nonetheless makes a strong impression and generates genuine emotions.

Thomas Lynch's deft collection of 5 stories brilliantly and simply meld death, life, and nature. Mr. Lynch has a visceral knowledge of Michigan. He knows the land and he knows the business of death. In "Catch and Release" a grieving fishing guide takes his father's ashes to scatter throughout the tangled roots of Michigan's lake system. The sentences in this story are as beautiful as any I have read since Hemingway. For example - "At the top, he began digging the dog's grave, the work quickening with anger and slowing with sadness, the variable speeds of the labor like the division of his heart." This sentence is balanced on the "and" like a fulcrum and is perfect. "Bloodsport" is a memorable piece of writing about the love of a mortician for a lovely young woman who is murdered by her husband. The heartbroken mortician has to prepare the body and reflects on the woman's life and death. "Hunter's Moon" is another superb road map paean to Michigan. Harold Keehn, a retired casket salesman recalls his job, the death of two marriages, and the deaths of his daughter and third wife. "Matinee de Septembre" is not as strong as the first three. The story is a not very clever rip off of "Death in Venice". Mr. Lynch was somewhat lackadaisical in his approach to this story unless he was being ironic which went over my head. The unrequited love is between two uninteresting women. The female scholar Ainsling follows around the teenage object of love, Bintalou, who is often the company of her father just as the the scholar von Aschenbach follows Tadzio who is in the company of his mother. The backdrop of the typhoid epidemic is replaced by the economic recession. There were no surprises with the ending. The novella "Apparition" takes a hard look at the death and ghost of a marriage between a minister and his bored wife. This was an interesting story. Altogether I really enjoyed Mr. Lynch's rich journey through the charming Michigan landscape. I am looking forward to reading his other writings.