more like the ghost in SUCK well no not really
Jonathan Carroll, The Ghost In Love

Jonathan Carroll is one of our greatest living writers. This is by far his weakest novel.

First off, the title is the worst of Carroll's career. It's so bland and generic! This from the man who brought us Kissing The Beehive, The Land Of Laughs, The Marriage Of Sticks, and Outside The Dog Museum, and actually provided in-story reasons for those titles rather than just coming up with something haunting and vaguely poetic and slapping it on the front. But beyond that aesthetic choice, the novel is a pretty blatant misstep. I know, I know, it's important to evaluate a work of art on its own terms. But there's a lot about it that sucks, and the fact that it's out of place in the context of Carroll's oeuvre does explain why it's a little more difficult to overlook the book's flaws and flimsiness. It's simple, perfunctory, and lifeless.

Like Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster, contemporaries [1] who have also spent the majority of their careers engaged in blending genre [2] and surrealist elements with literary fiction while trying not to get all middlebrow about it [3], Carroll's novels are best understood not on their own, but in conversation with each other. His masterwork, the six novels (his third through eighth) that have been termed the "Rondua series" or the "Answered Prayers sextet," take variations on samey plot structures to explore their subjects (love, family, art, the creative life, the unconscious, death, etc.) from the perspectives of different characters, coming to varied and contradictory conclusions (e.g. a seemingly harmless lie told to protect the feelings of a loved one may be a necessary mercy in one book, while it poisons the relationship in another). Although their stories are complete and stand-alone, their effects turn on how they vary from the other stories, so Weber Gregston's chilling choice at the end of A Child Across The Sky, for example, gains more power coming after the endings of Bones Of The Moon and Sleeping In Flame. Carroll's most recent two novels, White Apples and Glass Soup, are more directly connected in plot and character, the first focusing on the father of an unborn future savior, the second focusing on the mother. The end of Glass Soup, when little Anjo is born and slated to change the nature of reality, set the stage for another volume centered around the child.

The Ghost In Love is not that novel, even though it does revolve around changes to the rules of life and death. Instead, Ghost is most akin to The Wooden Sea, the concluding volume of the Crane's View trilogy and what until now I would have considered Carroll's most flawed novel. While packed with good moments, the odd time travel elements of the plot of The Wooden Sea are awkwardly handled and, though I do like the idea of adding science fiction to Carroll's bag of supernatural weirdness tricks, the mixture feels more quotidian and less unsettling than it should. But the conceit of The Wooden Sea, where protagonist Frannie McCabe is confronted with versions of himself at different times of his life, each of them essentially an entirely distinct individual, is a good one, and Carroll mines it well. Ghost has a similar central idea, but it's handled way, way worse. Let me get into the premise to explain.

The titular Ghost In Love is named Ling. Ling is in love with schoolteacher German Landis, who used to date Benjamin Gould until they broke up after Ben kinda died. He was supposed to die, at least, but he didn't; this is because he's arbitrarily special because of some random bureaucratic error made in Heaven (he's not the only one; others show up later on, including a woman named Danielle, to whom Ben gains a psychic connection). But his ghost was created, and that's Ling, who is named Ling, by the way, because all ghosts have Chinese names, since way back in the day, a Chinese farmer came up with the idea of ghosts to explain what happens when people die, and God heard this and thought it was a grand idea and had his angels implement it. A lot of the book is like this, taking short tangents to spew out personal data and historical information and rules (so that they can be broken, of course), and because almost all of this is irrelevant to the plot, all of this lives or dies by how intrinsically entertaining each bit is. German has a dog named Pilot, and dogs can see ghosts and talk to them in the dog language. Plus they can see cancer bounding down the street on its way to infect people. The dog material in this book is thinly justified by the narrative, contributing to the more general feeling that this is Carroll-by-the-numbers (because Carroll's that guy who does the magic talking dogs, right?), and there's such a constant undercurrent of sickly-sweet cutesiness that it threatens to tip the line into self-parody, especially when some nebulously magical creatures called verzes show up and all I can think of is Lady In The Water. The villain, meanwhile, is lame and nonthreatening and serves solely to prod the characters in whatever direction is necessary, and I know that beating him is intentionally anticlimactic because it's not the real conflict, but if we're supposed to believe that Ben's psyche is boundless in its expanse, then there's room for his negative side to be something more than a stock baddie.

Carroll's gift for sketching character through carefully chosen detail deserts him here; these are by far his most shallow leads, distinguished only by a few dull quirks and neuroses. Ling's love for German by necessity does not include the physical (great way to portray a woman loving a woman in the most safe, sanitized possible way!), so it's based entirely on her barely-existent personality and what she does, which is very little. Wow, German is a strong, confident, gutsy, impulsive woman! What makes her unique in this, exactly? German falls for Ben, again, for no other reason than because he's, you know, strong and confident and gutsy and impulsive. Carroll has a rare talent for handling complex, believable romantic relationships. This is not in evidence here.

The plot is simple and negligible -- weird, semi-arbitrary things happen to German and Ben, leading them to get back together to figure out what's going on, which is revealed to be all about Ben, as it becomes clear that fragments of his own identity are behind everything. Here's where the connection to The Wooden Sea comes up; where in that book the infinite variation was to be found in an individual at different times in his life, here the concept is that at any given moment, the being we call "you" is a combination of an infinite number of different selves, which is some well-traveled territory, but not necessarily a bad idea. Unfortunately, Carroll uses this in the service of a bland self-actualization message: recognize the limitless potential you have as a human being! Resist the negative aspects of yourself! You can be a devil or a saint! Yeah, I've played the Persona series, too. But here's where the real problem comes in. In Persona, the alternate selves found in people are figures from legend and mythology -- gods and fantastic beasts, thoroughly classified by tarot arcana, with very specific significance ascribed to each. When you see that Katsuya's starter Persona is Helios (and that Helios is a cat), that tells you something about his personality. When we meet a crowd consisting of aspects of Benjamin Gould, we get nothing but surfaces. Why is the bitter Ben female? Is there supposed to be something female about bitterness? What is it supposed to mean when some of the worst parts of Ben are identified as black / asian / etc.? There's an essentialism on display here, however unintended, that is kind of appalling. Sure, there is nothing blatantly offensive here, such as Ben coming across a kindly overweight black woman who represents the matronly part of him who loves cooking and cleaning and serving or something. But if you're literalizing a personal characteristic of feeling in the form of members of minority groups, you can't avoid the implication that you're associating those characteristics or feelings with that minority group. This is creepy and not okay. It would be enough to make me dislike the book even if the surrounding material were strong enough to compensate, but that's not the case.

The prose is well below Carroll's usual standard, and each new chapter feels the need to summarize the situation and point out how WACKY and OUT THERE it is; this might be intended as a concession to non-genre readers [4] who might have trouble keeping track of the odd metaphysics (which aren't all that odd; instead of the new agey "lives as part of a grand universal mosaic" model of White Apples and Glass Soup, the cosmology here is a fairly standard non-denominational Judeo-Christian framework that he adopts in order to subvert everything about it), but it has the effect of making the novel feel as though it were serialized and stitched together into a novel (and I don't think it was), or perhaps written round-robin style. Weirdly, Carroll plays a pronoun game with Ling, referring to her as "it" for a really long time until, for no apparent reason, he switches to referring to her as female. The constant attempted profundity of the third-person narration is at times hard to take, too. At one point, the narrator makes some rather inflammatory generalizations about the nature of bums; if Carroll had placed these in the mouth of Harry Radcliffe or any of his other narrators, I would be content, but framing them as universal pronouncements from the perspective of the omniscient makes them hard to take. All in all, an additional round of revision could have done this book a great deal of good.

This is Ben's story, and Carroll doesn't care about anyone here but him. Everyone else is marginalized; German is reduced to being Ben's motivation, and Ling and Pilot gradually disappear entirely. At one point, the inhabitants of a building are transported into their own happiest moments (in a way that might be deadly or soul-imperiling or something) by the influence of the supernaturally powerful selfishness of Danielle; our heroes observe this and move on, doing nothing to help. They don't care about the lives of anyone outside their own special magical clique, and neither, evidently, does the author. And when I recall the singularly unbearable and arbitrary asshole Death in Carroll's earlier From The Teeth Of Angels, I can't help but be disappointed with the much more conventional personification of the Angel of Death here, a cosmic functionary who serves mainly to go, "wow, those humans and their amazing potential" and congratulate humanity for taking its destiny into its own hands at the appropriate points. Teeth was a small-scale end to the Answered Prayers sextet with a simple, razor-thin conclusion about mortality. Ghost may be intended as a similar coda to the last six books, but the Crane's View trilogy and White Apples / Glass Soup don't work together as a part of the same cycle (there's a significant difference between their moral perspectives, to my mind, and a teasing reference to Ben's origins in Crane's View is not enough to bridge the gap), and Ghost is not a successful companion piece to The Wooden Sea despite the thematic connections. I hope that a proper conclusion to the White Apples / Glass Soup series is forthcoming, but more than that, I hope that Carroll is somehow capable (in his subsequent output) of retroactively justifying having written this book at this time. Good authors can write bad books. It's not an unpardonable sin. But when an author forges meaning through context and dialogue with his other works, a subpar book weakens the other links in the chain.

ETA: John Clute weighs in with praise and an explanation for the fact that "as soon as a Slick Fantasy convention about who ghosts can talk to is laid down, it is demolished." His position makes sense, but it sounds as though he really felt the central literalized metaphor of the novel where for me, it clunked. So it goes.

[1] Jonathan Lethem may be worth talking about in this context, too, despite being a generation later. Certainly the boring reddish comic book-y cover of this book brought to mind the boring reddish comic book-y cover of Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet, which I should write something about. Though that was a move towards horror, and this is another of Carroll's moves away from it.

[2] Science fiction for Murakami, detective fiction for Auster, horror for Carroll. Most of the time, at least.

[3] I know, loaded statement, but I don't feel like unpacking it right now. I will say that in my opinion, Murakami has been generally the most successful at this; Auster, consistently the least.

[4] Carroll's marketing, at least, has tried for mainstream sales / recognition ever since The Wooden Sea. It's conceivable that the problems I have with this book are intentionally caused by some misguided attempt to court a mainstream audience. But I doubt it. I mean, I hope Carroll is smart enough to realize that writing watered-down books would do him no favors with any readership or critics.