When Ghosts Have Hobbies: Howard Norman’S Novel ‘Next Life Might Be Kinder’

Janet Maslin of The New York Times reviews UMD English Professor Howard Norman's newest book.

By Janet Maslin, The New York Times.

The premise of Howard Norman’s new novel is eerie enough to make the skin crawl. “Next Life Might Be Kinder” is narrated by a blocked, troubled writer named Sam Lattimore, who delivers an opening sentence worthy of the Noir Hall of Fame.

“After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel, she did not leave me,” Sam begins. It is 1973, and Elizabeth has been “dead” for more than a year, but Sam goes on to say he has just seen her. He sees her most nights, doing exactly the same thing. She arranges books on a beach in Port Medway, Nova Scotia.

Is Sam really seeing her? Really talking to her? (They have surprisingly unfraught conversations, for a man deep in mourning and the deceased love of his life.) Is he hallucinating? Is someone playing a cruel trick on him? Or is he simply an unreliable narrator toying with the reader?

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