A Fine and Private Place

Peter S. Beagle

Welcome to Yorkchester Cemetery in the Bronx, home to a man hiding from life with his unusual friends: a talking raven, two love-struck ghosts, and an eccentric security guard.

The heart of the story is Jonathan Rebeck — once a pharmacist and now, after a series of events that shook him out of society, resident of an abandoned mausoleum in a large cemetery where he communes with the dead.

Rebeck has the rare ability to see the ghosts of people who have recently passed. He welcomes them, helps them get oriented to their new state of being, and sometimes challenges them to chess. But eventually, the ghosts gently, slowly fade away as they lessen their tethers to the earthly world. And Rebeck is left alone, alive but not fully living.

News of the outside world is delivered to him via a talking raven, who also brings Rebeck food stolen from people on the street. This story’s human characters lean toward the thoughtful and the melancholy, but the raven? He’s a rascal, adept at swiping food and serving acerbic wit along with the sandwiches he delivers.

One day, a new ghost named Michael arrives. During his funeral, his wife weeps over his grave while Michael experiences his first moments of the afterlife. ‘My body is there,’ he says. ‘All my chicken dinners and head-scratching and sneezing and fornication and hot baths and sunburns and beer and shaving — all buried and forgotten. All the little pettinesses washed away. I feel clean and light and pure. He thought about book-hunting on Fourth Avenue and decided that he felt like a smashed light bulb. Good-by, he said to his body and walked away down the paved road. He wanted to whistle and felt cheated when he found he could not.’

That’s not the only aspect of his new state of being that frustrates him. Michael is not quite ready to let go of the human world, and eventually, we learn that his death is more complicated than it seems.

Soon after, a young girl named Laura arrives. In life, she was a bookseller but was never all that impressed with being alive. She’s less reticent than Michael about moving on to the spirit world — but then they fall in love. Their emotions upset Rebeck’s quiet balance, and it only gets more complicated for him when a widow becomes a regular visitor to the cemetery.

This is a very talky book in a soul-satisfying way — the chronicle of a found family’s quiet adventures as they reckon with what it means to be alive and how to make the most of our fleeting time together.

The raven had come in the back way, and so he flew down Central Avenue, holding the baloney in his claws. The stretch of more or less simple headstones gradually began to give way to Old Rugged Crosses; the crosses in turn gave way to angels, the angels to weeping angels, and these finally to mausoleums. They reared like icy watchdogs over the family plots and said, ‘Look! Something of importance has left the world,’ to one another. They were aggressively Greek, with white marble pillars and domed roofs. They might not have looked Greek to a Greek, but they looked Greek to Yorkchester. — Peter S. Beagle

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