Items related to Polly's Ghost: A Novel
"I only wish I ever had the chance to hug and kiss him, teach him his letters and numbers, the colors and shapes, the animal sounds, all the starts of the ways of the world that accompany a person through life like rocks in a hard stream, put there as if for crossing."
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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Review:
In life, Polly Baymiller was the breezy, good-looking mother of three improbable sets of twins. She laughed easily, shrugged off the envy of other women, and seemed to want no life other than the one she was living. In death, however, Polly's disembodied spirit shuttles between longing and detachment--not missing her other children much, or even her husband, but aching to touch her last-born, Tip, the boy she died giving birth to, and whom she never held. Becoming aware of herself again years after death--part of the wind, now, and sometimes joining with leaves or raindrops or fence posts, for a moment or two, in some teasing approximation of a physical body--Polly struggles to get close to Tip, and unwittingly (almost clumsily) sets in motion events that change his life.
About the Author:
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
Abby Frucht is the author of five novels, including Snap, Licorice, Fruit of the Month, Are You Mine?, Life Before Death, and Polly's Ghost. The recipient of a New Voices Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the Iowa Short Fiction prize, she teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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- PublisherScribner
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0743244028
- ISBN 13 9780743244022
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages368
- Rating
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