A Fine And Private Place
(Peter S. Beagle)
A druggist in early middle age comes to believe the world has no place for him, and flees in a night?s existential crisis to shelter in a decrepit mausoleum in a New York City cemetery. Twenty years later he?s still living there, a tottery, open-hearted, spiritually muddled old man: a smart-mouthed raven he?s befriended brings him food, and he spends his days playing chess and making small talk with a slow succession of ghosts of the newly dead (who soon drift away from him into oblivion). Things seem to have fallen into a pleasant-enough routine?he sometimes allows himself the indulgence of believing he too is a ghost?until the former bodies of two unusually lively ghosts are buried nearby, an angry young man determined to cling to his waning consciousness and a winsome young woman who doesn?t know as much as she thinks she does about eternity, and they catch him up in dramas left over from their lives and dramas they create in their afterlives. On top of that, there?s a vivacious, no-nonsense widow hanging around, having noticed him despite his best efforts to hide during a visit to her late husband?s monument? This is a low-key, steadily paced, simple story of companionship and much philosophizing and gradual realizations. Beagle was very young when he wrote it, and his writing is full of sometimes perfect, sometimes extravagant, sometimes clumsy imagery. He works for a dignified, expansive tone and often achieves a sweet kind of wisdom; less often, he lays it on too thick and comes across as either smugly knowing or outright mistaken about the world. Clearly, A Fine and Private Place is a training ground for Beagle?s unerring, pitch-perfect, startlingly insightful masterwork, The Last Unicorn. The earlier book is equal parts charming whimsy and meditative, bittersweet solemnity, with some big, difficult things to say about love and death and how we choose to spend and order our lives. But, as Beagle had yet to figure out all these things for himself, we have to be patient when he stumbles.
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