Customer Reviews

The Inhabited World

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't typically write Amazon reviews, but I'm really amazed this book hasn't received more attention. I picked this book up at random in the library, and I will be forever grateful for that instance of serendipity. This is just a really well-written novel. I completely identified with the characters, which was surprising for me, as I often find fiction to be frustrating. As Roger Ebert says about movies, it's not what the movie is about, but how it is about it. This statement can apply here, as the story is wonderfully realized. This is a terrific novel. Read it.

The Inhabited World is what Evan Malloy left behind by dying. It is world he can see and hear -- but never rejoin -- after his death. In this novel, David Long turns around Descartes' dictum, "Cogito, ergo sum", and re-structures the world from the viewpoint of one who no longer lives, but still thinks, and does so with more understanding than when he was alive.

This is not your typical ghost story, although Long makes it clear from the outset that his narrator and principal character, like Dicken's Marley, is indisputibly deceased. 10 years after his death, Evan Malloy thinks, feels, sees, and hears everything that goes on in what had once been his Seattle house.

Long's crisp prose describes the characters populating the story, both the quick and the dead, with startling immediacy. They talk as real people do, not always making sense or even saying what they really mean. We are allowed to hear the internal dialog as well as what is actually spoken. I enjoyed seeing the present and past, and gradually fitting the pieces together, to see what drove Evan to despair and then to suicide.

To call this a ghost story is somewhat misleading, as it does not fit the mold of fantasy or "sci-fi." Its fictional characters are delineated, and their conversations crafted, in a reportorial style. If there were a genre for this book, it might be "imaginative memoir", for Evan's story is told in flashbacks, even as the action of new characters unfolds.

A vivid and compelling read, and, despite its gritty, reality-based subject matter, a book that left me feeling good about life in the inhabited world.

It's been a week since I finished The Inhabited World, and I still can't shake its spell. I read the terrific review in the NY Times, which piqued my interest, but I had no idea the experience of entering the world of this book would be so fulfilling and moving.
I have to say that I'm flabbergasted by the review printed here on Amazon, claiming the book is "slight" -- flabbergasted. I really don't know how anyone could arrive at that word. The daily life of the protagonist was so specific, small in scope but precise and utterly believeable, all of which qualities are rendered so poignant by the circumstances of the present (his suicide).
It is written with mastery; no new writer could achieve this simplicity, could so completely put his words to the service of his story. I never marvelled at his prose, just at the characters' behavior, and only after the book was laid down did I marvel at the exquisite and invisible engine that had driven the story to its conclusion. A heartbreaking and life-affirming conclusion.

I read this book over the past 4 days, and it is still with me. I found myself doing something I rarely do when reading... going back and re-reading certain passages because of the pure, simple beauty of Long's writing and clarity of his observations on love, live, and death. Evan Molloy is certainly flawed and not the most sympathetic character, but this is what makes him so utterly likeable... he could be you, me, our sibling, our neighbor, anyone. As his mother tells him early on, he has a charmed life - a happy childhood, education, meaningful work, and marriage to his soul mate, who he then wrongs in the worst way. Later, given the chance to love again, he is betrayed by his own mind, suffering from mental illness. His suspension between the living world and the afterlife, and his 'relationship' with the new owner of his home, 30-something Maureen, herself struggling to find her footing after leaving her job and fleeing a destructive affair, allow him to reflect and uncover the mysteries of his own death, and ultimately for him to be free.

Evan commits suicide and returns 10 years after his death to his Seattle area home where he tries to understand "why" he did it - he reflects on his life and his quest for strength to escape his battle with depression and failed relationships. The book is dark and often foggy and rainy like its setting in winter in the Pacific Northwest. However, it is beautifully written and places the reader in the shoes of one where if your DNA was off-kilter just a tad - you can imagine that it could happen to you...

I have not, in the past, felt compelled to write reviews on the internet, but this book is so haunting, smart, poetic, and strange, I can't help myself from asserting to potential readers: read it. This is an author who has such a sense of the nature of human beings, their motivations, the depths of the psyche--it changed the way I'll ever again see some of the people in my life. While I was reading it, I found myself talking to its characters, recalling its details, singings its praises to strangers. It entered my dreams! I'm not doing it just, but will say, you won't find another novel like this, and you won't forget it.

What a lovely book, lusty and light, a tale of human presence and absence. After his death, the protagonist, Evan, inexplicably finds himself in the house he occupied as a living man. We sit upon Evan's shoulder and travel with him through time, re-live his life of flesh, and with him we make sense of his flawed relationships and his deepening (mortal) depression. The language of the story has, itself, a ghostly quality, often hovering around what is missing as much as what is there. Evan's catharsis arises from his humanity. Simple as that.

The premise of a lonely ghost observing life going on in the house in which he died is what attracted me to David Long's novel. But that idea is actually a rather slight portion of this story.

For reasons neither he, nor the reader, ever understand, Evan is doomed to remain in the house in which he committed suicide 10 years earlier. While the premise is fantastical, the tone of the novel is not. We see Evan's life is fragmented, almost swirling snapshots, which seem appropriate for a lost soul still piecing his recollections together. Long writes beautifully in a very literate style and much of the story is Evan reflecting upon his life. And the events of his life are rather prosaic and mundane. He meets his wife, marries her, has an affair, is divorced, reunites with his wife and her troubled daughter. Perhaps Long's point is that life is mundane. But Long's elegant, somewhat melacholy prose holds the reader more than the story itself.

There's a slightness to the narrative. And Evan's connection to Maureen, the woman living in 'his' house doesn't seem fully fleshed out. What is it about her that touches him more than the previous tenants in the house? (She seems to most resemble the woman with whom he had an affair, but that connection is never made explicit.) We follow Evan's mental collapse leading to his suicide in the flashbacks, but it feels a bit arbitrary. There's a slightly aloof quality to Long's story and prose and Evan remains an oddly generic character. It's clear long before the reader gets to the end of this book that there will be no tidy conclusion to this story. And there isn't. And since the emotional impact of the ending hinges on Evan's connection with Maureen, it's puzzling that this connection is what is slighted for much of the novel.

This is a lovely novel -- readable, if not entirely compelling, but perhaps not what many readers might expect from its other-worldly premise.

"What a funny thing, life," thinks Evan Malloy, the main character in David Long's new novel, The Inhabited World. And it is, despite the fact that Evan is a ghost, having died by suicide but existing now in a kind of purgatory, confined to wandering the house and yard where he once lived with his wife, Claudia. Now he invisibly observes the house's string of new inhabitants, including the current one, Maureen.

The Inhabited World is not your usual ghost story by any stretch but rather a deeply moving meditation on life's meaning--or lack of meaning if the life dead ends, if human connections fail to offer solace or succor. Though we learn in the first pages that Evan is dead by his own hand, and that the story of his life and death will come through him in fragments or revealed "tiles" that finally form a full picture, The Inhabited World is curiously life-affirming. Evan may have killed himself, and in the process--as he fully understands from his purgatorial fourth dimension--caused unbearable suffering to those he leaves behind, especially his wife, Claudia and father, Donovan. Still, Evan does atone in a strange way by watching after the house's current occupant, Maureen, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with an older married man. Evan cannot physically protect Maureen against the cruel manipulations of Ned, but Evan is not without an ability to influence the human world--that is, his world, the house and yard beyond which he cannot go--and, in the case of Maureen, guide her toward her own strength to resist and take back control. Evan's tenderness for Maureen becomes the purpose of his life after death, and there's a hint that his abiding watchfulness, his role as her "angel of mercy," will lead to Evan's release from his term of confinement.

The story of Evan, Maureen, Claudia and Claudia's almost existentially unhappy teenage daughter Janey--for whom Evan, during the brief period of his second marriage to Claudia, forms a bond of empathy and understanding--flips intricately from past to present, from Evan's life with Claudia to his "new life" (as he calls it), the one with Maureen. Chapters are intense, economical, revelatory. One, "Sleep on the Beach," has the living Evan and Claudia, now newly remarried, experiencing the hugeness of the star-flecked cosmos and, as a corollary, their own fragility. "This is just very powerful, Ev, looking out into all that," says Claudia. "You know? I'm sort of tongue-tied." And for good reason. Evan's infidelity ended their first marriage. Now, many years later, they've tried a second time. And the second time, complicated by the upheavals of step-daughter Janey, often works, though ultimately it will not. It's this foreknowing--Evan's descent into depression, his suicide, his "re-awakening," the imprisonment of his spirit in the old house--that gives this scene on the beach a deep pathos.

The Inhabited World resonates with Long's empathy for the inhabitants of his fictional world. The writing comes from intimate knowledge of how people work, how men and women interact, either as allies or combatants (or, variously, both), saying one thing, meaning three others. No novelist I know has a more finely tuned ear to the nuances of how people speak. No one writes more observantly or truthfully about sex than Long, about how the dynamics can range from tenderness and mutuality to power and control: sex as communion or sex as warfare. And no one knows better how to lay down deft brush strokes of humor, as when Evan and Claudia, in the second marriage, lie in bed. "`Your feet still cold?'" he asked. `Icy.' `Then don't get them near mine,' Evan said. Claudia immediately put her feet on his."

But what may be the most remarkable feature is the writing itself. There is simply never a sentence in The Inhabited World that seems pedestrian, tossed off. Paragraph after paragraph, sentences have a new-minted glint, always surprising, never straining to be stylistically showy but always perfectly pitched, almost tactile in their sensory and sensual architecture. It would be next to impossible to illustrate this well by pulling sentences from their narrative context, but here's a brief passage that gives an idea. In a late chapter, Maureen has one more time endured the sexual demands of Ned, the married radiologist who knows what he wants, everyone else be damned. After Ned drives off and Maureen is alone in the house--so she believes--she has to deal with the glass of iced tea she'd earlier offered him out of perfunctory hospitality:

"Maureen stares, adjusts the kimono where it blouses open, finally takes the tumbler between two fingers, hurries it to the trash like a used diaper, clomps the lid down, turns to look around as if someone might have caught her in the act."

It's this continual care with detailing, the rendering of these human moments, that illuminates the entire novel, that makes us believe a man can be more alive--more conscious--in death than in life. In death, not only is raging insomnia no longer an issue, Evan learns, since he exists in a continuous state of observant wakefulness, neither is depression, anger, the need for medications, and the host of other earth-bound maladies. In the simple act of observing Maureen's comings and goings, Evan learns that he can, in a mysterious way, help the living Maureen find the strength to move forward, and in doing so, redeem himself for that one moment when he could not get beyond what he recognizes as "surmountable despair." And that may be the book's central and brave notion: despair is surmountable.

In The Inhabited World David Long presents readers a great gift in language that climbs to a high promontory of imaginative engagement and stays there. The gift is wisdom about the human condition ("the whips and scorns of time," as Hamlet, another suicidal, famously soliloquizes), about what's worthwhile and what's mere distraction from the worthwhile, about not enduring those insurmountables stoically alone but having the courage to call out for the love of others. The beauty of this novel--perhaps of art itself--is that it offers reasons for living, for forging ahead, for accepting life as weird, mysterious, maddening (in all its senses), for seeing it like Evan, as "a funny thing"--and not, after all, as a lightless narrowing cave, not as unfathomable. David Long fathoms life. So does Evan, finally. In The Inhabited World, we are given the same chance as Evan--to "reconsider" the world from a certain perspective of remove, to return to a sense of wonder and awe, like a night on the beach under stars with someone you love.

While a well written book, this didn't deliver for me. The concept -- "a kind of love story, one-way and unrequited, between the dead and the living" (NYT) -- was, perhaps, the intent of the novel, and is what intrigued me to get it, but isn't what the book is about.

The connection between the narrator, Evan, and Maureen, an eventual resident of the house in which he committed suicide, is tenuous. Why her presence has finally allowed him to access new insights is unclear; their histories -- hers is limited here to a recent break-up not fully explored -- are completely different. Evan's story is the only one really explored, and it's rather mundane: a decent guy who doesn't fully appreciate life's gifts battles depression, and eventually -- it's handled adroitly in the book -- puts an end to it.

This is an interesting enough, readable book. If you read the reviews carefully, critics laud the author's writing foremost. I would agree. This is a well-crafted and written book, but a bit slight on substance.