In life, Polly Baymiller was a fierce and passionate woman ardently in love with her husband and her three sets of twins. Why should she be any different in death?
Polly's Ghost begins when Polly, an ethereal, glimpses her nine-year-old son, Tip, for the first time since she died giving birth to him. He's the only baby she never got to hold, to kiss, or to guide from one uncertain moment to the next deliberate one, and it is Tip she has missed most fervently in the years she has spent learning to be a ghost.
Love, Polly comes to realize, is not a state of mind but a way of being. One must act on the feeling in order to make it count. And act she does, taking bold steps from "above" to make sure that Tip has the courage and curiosity he needs to make his own precious way on Earth. Meanwhile, Polly -- drawn into and out of the earthly stories of the unfolding lives of other people -- follows her own path, away from a tormented ghostliness toward an abundant peace.
It is a testament to Abby Frucht's talent that this novel explores so ecstatically and yet so bracingly that most sentimental of all subjects -- the relationship between mother and child. Polly's Ghost is a stunning successor to Life Before Death, which The Boston Globe hailed as a "breathtakingly beautiful story."
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In her slow accretion of details and her precise renderings of the visual world, Abby Frucht manages to avoid the sentimentality that would have killed Polly's Ghost as surely as the birth of Tip kills Polly Baymiller. Polly's much-loved husband Jack, for example--unaware that she lives on, in an altered state, and sometimes watches him--goes about his mourning in the quiet, competent way he might plane a piece of wood or design a bookcase.
Then there was the kitchen, Polly's room, which was as steamy and moist and mysterious to Jack as the cooking that once went on there, which nevertheless seemed to belong to him as much as it did to Polly when he zipped up the back of her dress or brushed her hair for a moment after she'd washed it, when it was wet and sweet smelling, when she'd have to brush it again by herself, laughing at him for having parted it the wrong way. Even her comb, a version of Jack's, was slimmer than his and more decorative, and the ornate handle of Polly's brush, adorned with cast silver roses, was like an accessory to Jack's elegant, simple, fluted silver brush, just as Eve's rib had been a smaller, more decorative version of Adam's.Although Frucht's vision of life after death is appealing, she is at heart a realist. The strongest passages in her fifth novel are earthy in every sense, whether Polly is describing her perch in a rain-soaked tree, or listening in on other people's sexual thoughts, or watching Tip's friend Johnny as he kisses his unattainable girlfriend and catches a "shadowed glimpse of inside her body" in her "prayerfully flaring nostrils." With its gravity and lyricism punctuated by a sharp-focus sexuality, Polly's Ghost calls to mind writers as remote from each other as Toni Morrison and John Irving. Demanding but deeply enjoyable, the novel is filled with unexpected connections and quirky satisfactions. --Regina Marler
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