[In the following review, Clark evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of several stories within Women and Ghosts, asserting that Lurie's writing displays wit, irony, and a deft touch.]

Alison Lurie has for many years continued to create quietly explosive comedies revolving around the foibles of upper-middle-class Americans, particularly academics or those in academic communities. Her writing transforms itself through its ability at once to satirize and sympathize, urging her readers towards careful interpretations of complex human behaviour. In this collection of nine ghost stories, her talent for subtlety and equivocation is to the fore, making its force felt in the sheer range and diversity of characters and in the inventiveness of the situations they find themselves in.

Women and Ghosts perhaps has most in common with Lurie's 1967 novel, Imaginary Friends, a story of mental disintegration based on the infiltration of a religious cult by two sociologists. The targets of its sharp and ironic wit were the notion of academic objectivity and the power of charismatic figures, summed up by its seemingly innocuous epigram, “Seek and ye shall find”: if you're looking hard enough for something, you'll probably find it, even if you end up by inventing it. The characters in the most successful of the stories, here, seem to be looking for something-love, marriage, a child, professional recognition, or maybe just attention. The wraiths that appear to them do so in various guises, sometimes appearing to be friendly protectors, warning of the dangers ahead, occasionally simply making an entrance which confuses and disconcerts, and at other times clearly vengeful spirits, providing a moral comment on the behaviour of the protagonists. Throughout, they have clear connections with the psychological lives of those whom they haunt.

As with all collections, some stories exercise a stronger fascination than others. A couple of the slighter pieces (for example, “Counting Sheep” and “Another Hallowe'en”) are disappointingly bland, neither frightening nor amusing. Mostly, however, Lurie's facility for creating characters who simultaneously elicit our support and our criticism makes for robust writing that fits well with the mystery of the ghost theme. Her heroes are nearly always sceptical, self-aware and practised enough to recognize hysterical hallucination and emotional disturbance when it confronts them. In “In the Shadow,” Celia Zimmern, a career diplomat first encountered as a child in The War between the Tates (1974), moves between suitors, elegantly and skillfully evading any form of commitment but refusing to reject anybody outright. When the most prominent of her boyfriends is killed in a car crash, she feels only “a mild sadness, and also, for Dwayne had become quite a nuisance in the final month or so, a little relief”. Dwayne's reappearance from beyond the grave is deliciously apt: he begins to appear to Celia whenever she touches another man. For the first time in Celia's life, her poise and her faith in the measurable, knowable world is shaken, and she flees to a tiny country in West Africa. Lurie develops the irony of this situation—a woman berated by a man for her inability to settle down—to its full potential, and when Dwayne's spirit is finally banished by a mixture of spirit magic and true love the resolution remains uneasy and ambivalent.

The stories are at their best when they combine this sense of mistrust for empirical data with the self-deceptions and vanities of their characters. This happens to humorous effect in the first story, “Ilse's House,” in which a bright young statistician engaged to a charismatic college professor starts seeing his first wife crumpled in a heap on the kitchen floor. Lurie gently parodies the certainties of her professional language: “By Christmas of that year, I'd begun to sense a rising curve of possibility in the relationship.”

There is more parody in “The Double Poet,” the final and perhaps the most interesting piece. The ghost takes the form of that chilling literary archetype, the doppelgänger. Karo McKay, once Carrie Martin, is a poet much given to performing her intense brand of nature poetry, in flowing silk dresses with Satie playing in the background. A self-styled sibyl, she fails to predict the movements of her double, who begins to tour the country, signing books, giving interviews and seducing businessmen. The figure of the double provides Lurie with a starting-point to explore the nature of authorial identity and the idea of the artist as creator but also as salesperson, the onset of the doppelgänger coincides with a decline in Karo's output and an increased marketing drive by her wily new agent. What gives the story its edge is its marvelously playful style, florid and declamatory, as here where Karo considers her position in the religion of poetry: “A religion, yes, or at least a cult, with its own temples and altars, its dead saints, its living hierarchy of priests and priestesses; its deacons vergers and sextons (the critics) and its statistically small but devout congregations. And I am part of it all—a member of the Poetrian clergy: priestess, prophetess.”

Lurie is an accomplished enough satirist to have crafted these stories without an overarching theme. If one occasionally wonders whether the self-imposed structure of “ghost story” is always necessary, or indeed desirable, a faultless touch and delicate sense of irony carry the day.