On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

As a hospice volunteer, Joanna knows the importance of moments. Her own checkered past has led her back to the small North Carolina town of Fulton, where she made peace with her daddy and now records the last thoughts and words of the dying at the Pine Haven retirement center. But she also is fully engaged with living and the living, from tattooed single mom CJ to troubled pre-teen Abby to retired third-grade teacher Sadie. The latter optimistic soul uses Polaroid snapshots, cut-out magazine scenes, color markers and glue to assemble collages of her friends in places they have only imagined. “I can make you a memory and I can make a dream come true,” she says.

Jill McCorkle does something similar in her new novel, Life After Life, spinning words and images into a story that rings so true you forget it’s fiction. I once wrote about one of her books — maybe the novel Carolina Moon, maybe the story collection Final Vinyl Days, possibly both — that her characters live so fully within the pages that you swear they also live outside them. They’re that real.

Take former lawyer Stanley Stone, who has moved to Pine Haven with his obsession for wrestling, Herb Alpert and inappropriate remarks. But he is faking dementia because he wants his grown son to have a life of his own. Rachel Silverman, another retired lawyer, may be the one to figure him out, although she has her own secret reason for leaving Massachusetts for Pine Haven — it’s next to the cemetery where the love of her  life is buried next to his wife. The cemetery is also a refuge for Abby, who is mourning her lost  dog Dollbaby and hoping that her parents — social-climbing Kendra and amateur magician Ben — split up. Kendra is carrying on an affair with a married man, while Ben, once Sadie’s favorite student and Joanna’s best childhood friend, drinks too much and perfects a disappearing chamber. “And now ladies and gentlemen, I will make this normal ordinary girl disappear.”

Joanna remembers Ben’s words over the years and once tried to make herself disappear by drowning in a hot tub — only to be rescued by a giant dog named Tammy. And it was Tammy’s owner Luke who gave Joanna back her life, encouraging her to “unpack her heart” of failed projects, toxic relationships, old grievances and wounds. Joanna is still working on that.

McCorkle has the gift of mixing humor and heartbreak so as to make you laugh one moment, cry the next. Death can be peaceful, or it can be sudden, even violent. Happy endings are not guaranteed, and surprises still await the most jaded. In the end, Life After Life is true-to-life.

Open Book: I read a digital galley and review copy of Jill McCorkle’s Life After Life (Shannon Ravenel/Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). It’s not to be confused with the new book of the same title by Kate Atkinson, which I’ll be writing about when it pubs next week. They both are good but different.