Death of an Ordinary Man

Starred review from December 13, 2004
It has often been said that dead men tell no tales. Nathan Clark, however, can't stop talking. In this latest brimstone-tinged novel by British writer Duncan (I, Lucifer,
etc.), Clark, a recently deceased history teacher, appears at his own funeral, hovering over the mourners. Ghost-like, "a radical amputee... o body, but a maddening imposture of sensation," he glides through the action, tuning into the thoughts of his father, Frank; his wife, Cheryl; his college-age son, Luke; and his daughter, 17-year-old Gina. A suffocating sadness surrounds these characters, not only because of Nathan's untimely end but also because of the recent violent death of Lois, Nathan's youngest child. As he attempts to order his memories, Nathan ponders the many facets of his love for prickly, ambitious Cheryl, despite her affair with his best friend; for clever, sensitive Gina; for self-contained Luke, a physics student; and for Lois, lovable swimmer and violinist. Duncan's exhilarating, almost exhausting flood of insight into family patterns of love and habit ("It was a grotesque lie, that you loved all your children equally") is matched by the rich unexpectedness of his writing and the complex construction of the narrative, which mimics the structure of thought. The mystery of Lois's death and the narrator's own death—symbolized by a dark room in the family house that Nathan's ghost is afraid to enter—give the novel a hint of suspense, but it's the steady stream of small revelations that gives it its power to haunt. Agent, Jane Gelfman at Gelfman Schneider. (Jan.)

Forecast:
Despite its superficial resemblance to
The Lovely Bones and other recent novels narrated from beyond the grave, this has more in common with Iris Murdoch's analytical chronicles of love and friendship.

November 15, 2004
As this novel opens, Nathan finds himself falling into darkness and emerges to float above his own funeral. But this is no thriller or hokey ghost story. British novelist Duncan (I, Lucifer) has crafted a knife's-edge tale of one man's simple life and gradual undoing through family tragedy, told glancingly in taut, elliptical passages. Along with the reader, Nathan pieces together his life and death mosaiclike as he hovers around his family after the funeral, able to sense their feelings and falling into the memories thus invoked. We see his passion for his edgy, intense wife, who ultimately betrayed him with his best friend; we register his concern for his floundering son and budding, tough-as-nails older daughter. We learn that a younger daughter has died and are eventually rubbed raw by the details of her horrific death. Duncan layers on brilliant prose-sometimes a little heavily, as the narrative seems to slow halfway through. In the end, however, he has produced an arresting story, and he writes convincingly and affectingly of the consequences of a child's death, which is pretty rare indeed. Recommended for most libraries, particularly where readers are venturesome.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2004
Duncan's cerebral fifth novel is narrated by a dead man with a cloudy memory, for he cannot even recall the circumstances of his own death. Instead, he functions like "a radical amputee. No body, but a maddening imposture of sensation." He is privy to the innermost thoughts of his grieving family: his complicated, now emotionally deadened wife; his troubled son; and his older daughter, newly awakened to her sexuality. He sometimes hovers above his family, and he is sometimes violently thrown into reliving key moments of his past by objects he encounters; he begins to remember the richness and vibrancy of his marriage and how it all disappeared after their youngest daughter was brutally murdered by a pedophile, a fact that is closely connected to his own death. Stories narrated by the dead have been popular of late (Alice Sebold's " The Lovely Bones; " Neil Jordan's " Shade"), but Duncan uses the device in a new way: to explore the extremes of human behavior and emotion. His Catholic sensibility informs this powerful, unflinching, and frequently dazzling meditation on the kind of courage it takes to endure the unthinkable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)