A haunted novel about grief, dislocation, and the big afterlife of ordinary days. 

Its narrator, Michael Reed, is a middle-aged academic drifting through a Midwestern university after the deaths of his wife and daughter. He attends meetings, lunches, parties, half-conversations; he moves through campuses, hotel rooms, bars, offices and dinner tables with the numbness of someone who is technically still alive but no longer fully convinced by the world around him.

It has Johnson’s usual gifts — menace without melodrama, spiritual exhaustion, sentences that feel plain until they suddenly open a trapdoor. Less sprawling than Tree of Smoke and less mythic than Jesus’ Son, this is one of his quieter, more interior books: almost like campus novel as ghost story, desire as a small and dangerous attempt to re-enter life. A strong one for readers of late-life masculinity novels, campus unease, spare American fiction, and fiction about loss that refuses sentimental repair.

Hardback first edition, HarperCollins, 2000, with full number line. Very good condition from photos, with clean boards/pages and only light handling to the dust jacket. Printed on acid-free paper.