POLLY’S GHOST
By Abby Frucht
Scribner, 362 pages, $25
The temptation to imagine life in the hereafter is universal. Nearly everyone, from small schoolchildren to saints, has ventured down that long and disorienting corridor of speculation. Artists especially love to imagine what it’s like to be dead. Think of the Italian painter Tiepolo, with his grandly baroque, illusionistic cloudscapes, or, at the nightmare end of the spectrum, Hieronymus Bosch’s hellish right-wing of the triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Think of Dante. Think of Blake. Think of filmmaker Vim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” or its recent remake, “City of Angels.” (Not to mention the movie “Ghost.”) Think of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.”
In Abby Frucht’s new novel, “Polly’s Ghost,” Polly Baymiller is the mother of three sets of twins and a seventh child, a son, whom Polly died giving birth to. She is, or was, the sexy yet sensible wife of Jack, a loving and occasionally outrageous companion to her friends and husband and children, a woman who once wore a paper dress for the express purpose of shocking her neighbors and later enjoying the experience of tearing it to bits while wedged cozily in the back seat of a car with her amorous husband.
Polly lived her life with passion, and so she is a passionate ghost. Her chief aim is to watch over her last son, Tip, who inherited his mother’s charisma but has had to make do without her correcting presence in his life. Meanwhile, because Polly is not exactly mistress of her domain in the hereafter, but rather the vague concubine of the masterly figure of the Night, who whirls her here and there over the world, Polly can reach her son to offer maternal counsel only in the most second-hand, hit-or-miss kind of way. Just as she gets a fix on Tip, she is whisked away to find herself whispering in someone else’s ear.
“Ghosts don’t know how to be ghosts right away,” Polly confesses. “We have to find our own methods, unfurl our own maps, unwind, one way or another, the routes that might lead us to rest.”
Yet despite its ghostly narrator, this is less a book about being dead than about being alive, as if Frucht knows all about human grief and human joy, but not exactly what it would be like to be dead. (And who can blame her?) For though Polly can yearn to touch her son with as much passion as a live woman, she is, in the end, dead, and by that definition beyond help. Her interference in the course of Tip’s life begins with an accident she causes in an accidental way, and the rest of the novel more or less follows what happens as that accident slowly plays itself out, all the characters finally converging in the field of the living while Polly looks on anxiously from afar, contenting herself with occasional nudges–much like most mothers, dead or alive.
Though Polly is the narrator of the novel, she is not, in a way, its central figure. Her powers are limited, and so is her physical experience, as befits a ghost. This combination could make for a deathly stillness at the heart of the novel–Polly as the ultimate in passive protagonists, as it were. But Frucht works valiantly to make Polly’s life as a ghost real: “Knees, elbows, wrists, thighs, nape, crook, bend, crease–my whole ghost of a body a fluke in the day’s barometrics, the air pressure dipping and swelling, a spiral of leaves on an eddy of exhaustion.” And, wisely, Frucht doesn’t linger in Polly’s realm. For long stretches of the novel we forget that Polly is our source of information at all, as if even her creator couldn’t sustain quite enough momentum in Polly’s disembodied experience (though her past life is rendered with wonderful skill) to keep either herself or us interested.
But we are interested, deeply so, in the characters Polly encounters, and their stories develop with an almost hypnotic richness of detail, lives thoroughly real and specific and knowable and full of exquisite emotional delicacy and nuance. (It’s tempting to consider what might have happened had Frucht abandoned Polly altogether and just told the interweaving stories straight up.) Tip’s childhood friend Johnny, the widowed Ginny and her daughter Honey, the solitary veteran Sid and a cast of other small players who step on stage for brief roles–these are unforgettable people, and their stories are told by Frucht (the author of five previous novels) with humor and sympathy and exactness in prose as lovely as it is acrobatic.
“Polly’s Ghost” is really an elegy to ordinariness, the miracle of ordinariness. Here is a description of life at the Baymillers’ house, for instance:
“All the twins growing up side by side in their rooms always coming and going, and the mirror on the medicine chest in the bathroom beaded with moisture from somebody’s shower, and the telephone busy or ringing, and the clarinet case instead of the lunch box by accident in the refrigerator, and the T-shirts the boys intentionally crumpled in the freezer to be cracked loose and worn frozen on sweltering days, and the matching sets of voices rising from the basement, where Douggie and Drew stuffed shotgun casings or from the dock, where Tip and Dennis shouted, `Take me to your leader!’ at a UFO, and the smugness of Jenna’s voice winning another argument about whether or not it was nasty for a girl to hang her bras on the clothesline to dry–all of that had been over and done for a decade.”
You could love a world as vivid as that. Polly did, and that’s why, presumably, she lingers on, not quite willing to let go.
Early on in “Polly’s Ghost,” Tip muses on his late mother: “(H)e believed in her forgiveness the way some people might believe in ghosts, a little afraid, not of the ghosts but of the amount of faith required to sustain such belief.”
Though it’s a stretch to consider things from Polly’s point of view, Frucht certainly makes you want to try.
