WAS IT BEAUTIFUL?

After Shadow Baby (2000), McGhee drifts maudlin-ward in a tale of loss set in upstate New York.

At 27, William Jones—dubbed William J., while his father is William T.—gets Cogan’s syndrome and goes deaf. Not long after, walking the railroad tracks one day, he gets hit by a train and dies. And he wasn’t up there by himself, but with William T. So the question is, what really happened? We’ll wait a considerable time before finding out—if we do for certain. Childless now at 50, William T. is healthy enough in body, but he’s slipped downhill emotionally in the months since William J.’s death. He has a hard time not crying, the pressure pushing into his eyes all the time—at the diner for breakfast with Burl, William T’s friend since childhood; or when William T. talks to Sophie, William J.’s appealing young widow, who waitresses in the town’s other diner (but who may go to college, now William J. is gone); or when he so much as thinks about William J. or remembers him; or when he worries about Eliza, his now-separated wife, who’s living in a ever-cold house with her crabby and mean-spirited sister. Life is dismal, sad, bleak, and stunted: William T’s beloved pet cat gets killed and not even the winter is normal, without a flake of snow. William T.’s old friend Burl is a mailman, but he’s also a singer, a Welsh tenor who once had an offer to go professional in New York City. William J., from the time he was just a boy, used to love hearing him sing, and so does William T.—except that Burl has stopped doing it much anymore. Nevertheless, Burl’s voice will have its fateful role in the actual moment of William J.’s death on the tracks—and is unlikely to prove equally credible or moving to all readers.

Skillfully done, but little new, and determinedly sentimental.