I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME

Visits to a Civil War–era boardinghouse, a hospice in the Bronx, and the underworld.

“WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD” is Finn's answer when asked what words of wisdom he would like inscribed on his tombstone—by his dead ex-girlfriend, whom he has retrieved from the green cemetery where she was buried and is now giving a lift to...the other side. IT CERTAINLY WAS, thinks the reader of the novel Finn occupies. This otherworldly fairy tale opens with a letter written by the proprietress of an inn in the Confederate South to her sister, describing some trouble she is having with a handsome boarder. One is slightly bewildered, but also relieved, to find the second section of the book transporting us to what Finn, a recently fired schoolteacher, thinks of as "No York," home of neighborhoods NoHo, NoMad (“of course that was where he was staying”), and Nolita (“Didn't he date her in high school? Or rather, junior high?”). On the way to see his brother, Max, on his deathbed, Finn is planning some patter to amuse him, and if you know Moore, you can foresee that this will be some fine patter indeed. But then Finn is torn away from “the bardo of the hospice [with] its trapped souls and the steel beds and alarmingly colored drinks” by a phone call informing him of the suicide of his one-time girlfriend Lily, who had left him for another man but in death will be his alone. The story of Lily and Finn’s road trip and their passionate banter about life and death and love is interspersed with more letters from the landlady. Perhaps you will understand why, but if not you can focus on other Moore-ish delights, among them extraordinarily lovely descriptions of the hues and aromas of a decomposing body.

It doesn’t get more elegiac than this.