Poet's fiction debut is a clear winner

FICTION: Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories, By Thomas Lynch, Cape, 214pp. £12.99

IF THERE IS SUCH a thing as clarity of thought, the US poet and essayist Thomas Lynch possesses it in abundance. He is sparing with his words, he uses language as if it were a magic potion, not to be wasted. That said, there is such generosity and grace in his work that to read it is to experience a calming, observant intelligence. He is an original, of that there is no doubt. By the time his remarkable volume of essays, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade,was published in 1997, admirers of his poetry were already captivated by his wry tone and the gentle irony that shapes his anecdotes. His writing is lucid, measured and rich in exact images.

"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople," he announces in The Undertaking, "Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commissions." Oh, did I forget to mention that he is also a Michigan undertaker? He is, as was his father before him. But Lynch's book about death is really a profound engagement with life. The Undertakingoccupies a place of honour on the bookshelves of many readers, as will his new book, Apparition & Late Fictions, an impressive debut foray into the world of fiction from a writer who knows how to tell a good story. And does.

Just as his verse collections, Skating with Heather Grace (1986), Grimalkin & Other Poems(1994) and Still Life in Milford(1998) create their own worlds of the mind, evoking lives as lived and ideas and observations, so these stories excite and engage. Lynch sees a moment in a life, how it ebbs and flows, moves on or simply ends. In Catch and Release, a young man sets off alone for a day's fishing. Except that he is not alone, the thermos bottle before him in his boat contains his father's ashes. His thoughts are dominated by memories: "Danny remembered his father taking him fishing, that first time in the river, when he was a boy, how the water tightened around his body, the thick rubber of the Red Ball waders constricting in the current. It was late March. It was cold and clear and he wondered how his father ever found this place, hours from home, driving in the dark to get to the river at first light."

Danny’s grief is described so movingly, a quiet grief shot through with resentment. “He wanted to fill the elements with his heartache and anger – to shake a fist in the face of creation and ask God what exactly he had in mind that made his father die too soon.” Earlier, he recalls how his stepmother relayed the news: “He never said a word. Not a word. Never called out. Never made a sound . . . It was as if he knew it was his end.” It is a beautiful story; exact, precise, almost business-like. Lynch never sentimentalises a thought or a gesture. As a story it is moving, as a study of a son’s response to a father’s death, it is unforgettable.

Death is also central to Bloodsport, a story that creeps up on the reader. "Most times the remembrance was triggered by colour – that primary red of valentines or Coca-Cola ads." An undertaker recalls the dead body of a young girl, laid out on the mortuary slab, the sight had brought to mind the time he first met her, when she was little more than a child, mourning her dead father. The undertaker thinks about the girl and her mother, and how the girl had cried out to her dead father. "Five years after that and it was Elena, killed by her husband with a gun." Martin the undertaker ponders the murder. "He wondered if she knew he was dangerous. He wondered if she realised, after the first shot, that he was going to kill her. He wondered if she died with fear or resolve. He wondered if, bleeding from the first wound, she might have passed out, and never saw the face of her killer . . . " Slowly the details of Elena's life, the young woman the girl had become, emerge. For all its brutality, this is a gentle love story. In the character of Martin, Lynch has created a gentle, thoughtful man riven by regret as he remembers events that took place more than 20 years earlier: "Over time Martin learned to live with the helplessness and the sadness and the shame." A specific shade of red returns the image of the dead girl to his mind and reminds him of the disgust he felt as the cynical old pathologist commented on the killing, after he had examined the body. It is an extraordinary story, haunting and real, because Lynch deals in truths.

Hunter's Moonopens, "Some days on his walk Harold Keehan thought about his wives. Some days it was caskets". The narrative quickly acquires honourable echoes of John Updike. If Lynch does not quite achieve the languorous ease of Updike, it's not a weakness, – few do. But there are passages of deep reflection. "Time occupied for him a kind of geography, the north of which he thought of as the future and the south of which he thought of as the past and where he was at any given moment was the immediate present tense of his personal history . . . it kept him from feeling entirely lost." As he walks, he revisits his life, all the while remaining alert to the threat posed by a local watch dog, the latest in a long line of nuisances.

He recalls his first wife who left him for another woman. The comedy ends abruptly when he thinks of their daughter, Angela, "lovely and bright" and what happened to her. These stories are thoughtful in the sense that they are full of thought. Lynch is a thinker who watches the world about him with a forensic eye and the resignation of a philosopher. Despite his longtime connection with Ireland, these are American narratives. Updike also presides over Matiné de Septembre, a bitter-sweet study of self-absorbed loneliness in which a female academic of a certain age becomes immersed in a quasi-erotic artistic fantasy.

Just when the reader is thinking how very good these stories are, Lynch pulls an even more memorable narrative out of his magician’s case, the title story, a novella of humour and poignancy that sums up a life as lived by a man who never really did anything wrong, indeed, never really did anything except follow his modest, blameless dreams. “He could remember how he awoke one morning to find he had the very thing, a settled life . . . and a wife whose unhappiness seemed to grow in direct proportion to his happiness.” Reverend Adrian Littlefield, betrayed husband, gets his revenge through writing a survival manual for the divorced.

Updike’s ghost eases its way through three of the five stories. But this is not a weakness. Meditative and politely laconic, this is a terrific collection from a writer who thinks and feels and tells stories with an engagingly distilled candour and assurance all his own.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Timesand author of Second Readings: Beckett to Black Beauty(Liberties Press)