Grief and love in America are the subjects of Lorrie Moore’s new novel, which is part surreal road trip, part love story, and partly made of letters from a woman to her late sibling. Finn, a school teacher suspended for some of his unorthodox ideas about history, attends the bedside of his dying brother, Max, but is then drawn away by his fatal attraction to a suicidal ex-lover, Lily, right around the time of the 2016 election. His story is interspersed with letters written by Elizabeth, an innkeeper, to her dead sister in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Clever, cranky, bitter, and witty, Elizabeth describes herself as ‘unreconciled to just about everything’. The two parts of the narrative are themselves unreconciled, mostly; the connections between them remain oblique, with a lot of space for the reader to imagine different points of association.

Both parts are overtly concerned with the question of how one can possibly manage to live and love in the face of tragedy. A kind of manic cognitive dissonance attends the paradoxes of existence, the impossible necessity of attachment and non-attachment, for Finn as he grieves: ‘He saw that no longer caring about a thing was the key to both living and dying. So was caring about a thing.’ These intolerable contradictions collapse the boundaries between reality and imagination, and the novel shifts between realism and a version of magical realism in which corpses get up out of the ground, smelling like old pond water, and go for a drive, as everyone tries to come to terms with loss in their own quirky way.