[In the following review, Marks praises Familiar Spirits, judging the book to be an honest and skillful memoir of poet James Merrill and his partner David Jackson.]

A faint whiff of vindication almost inevitably attends Familiar Spirits, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie's totally absorbing memoir of her friends poet James Merrill and his longtime companion, writer and artist David Jackson. After all, she is at some pains to depict herself at the beginning of their friendship, in the mid-1950s, as an ordinary Amherst faculty wife struggling with the ordinary tribulations of limited funds, young children and an academic world in which women are valued primarily (and not too highly) for their skill in advancing their husbands' careers.

In such a world, Merrill and Jackson were anything but ordinary. They were both rich—Merrill, the son of Charles Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch, considerably so. They were both well-traveled, well-educated, cultured men whose open domestic relationship was decidedly unusual in the '50s, although apparently not scandalous in their closed academic circle. To Lurie, Merrill was the more original character, while Jackson was “wonderfully attractive: blond, tanned, strong.” Yet both these amazing creatures are departed—Merrill, lost to AIDS, Jackson, still alive but “his mind gone.” Only Lurie remains to tell their tale.

That tale falls, almost classically, into three parts: the first happy days of Merrill and Jackson's “marriage” (“It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew”); the middle years, in which Merrill and Jackson communicated with the spirit world via a Ouija board; and the Key West years, in which a renewal of the couple's life took a terrible turn.

Lurie's chapters on the making of The Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill's epic poem about his and Jackson's experiences with the Ouija board) offer powerful evidence of the rightness of Ezra Pound's claim that the highest form of criticism is criticism by new composition. Even many poetry lovers—Lurie among them—find this 560-page book daunting, with its extensive Ouija board pronouncements (all given in capital letters) and arcane spiritual hierarchy and teachings. Lurie enables casual readers to taste both the poem's peculiarities and its strengths by treating Sandover as part of her friendship with the two mediums. At times, she seems to be continuing a running argument she had with the authors, pointing out the limitations of their male- and gay-centered afterlife and, more sinister to Lurie, what she considers to be the fascistic and antisemitic implications of the poem's spiritual universe.

Weird and wonderful as Lurie's chapters on Sandover are, her account of Merrill and Jackson's Key West years grabs the reader by the throat. Bad things happen to Jackson: He turns to rough trade (Lurie uses no such crude term) for sexual companionship; his mind becomes befuddled by alcohol and low brain oxygen brought on by emphysema from years of smoking cigarettes. Still, these things make sense for an aging sensualist. But Merrill's last years read like a 20th-century Picture of Dorian Gray. He falls in love with “a tall, handsome young actor called Peter Hooten, a former featured player in several B-list Hollywood movies.”

First, as Lurie tells it, Hooten begins dressing like Merrill, then aping his manners and conversation, until, finally, he has totally appropriated Merrill's life, producing a monstrous (in Lurie's view) dramatic adaptation of Sandover on video, in which all the roles, save Merrill's, are played by Hooten and actors he has hired. Lurie clearly hates Hooten, and she devotes all of her considerable novelist's skills to etching his portrait in acid.

Lurie discloses that Merrill died of AIDS complications, and so Familiar Spirits may be added to the growing shelf of AIDS memoirs that includes Paul Monette's Borrowed Time and Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast. Yet Lurie's book doesn't quite belong in this company, and not just because it lacks the white-hot anger of Monette's account or the poetic luminosity of Doty's. After such a long friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie is perfectly comfortable with homosexuality, but she has no involvement with any gay political agenda. Moreover, her technique is novelistic and (despite her obvious love for her friends) in some ways dispassionate. Lurie likes to take a subject and view it from all angles (she offers “four sorts of messages traditionally received from the spirit world” and “three possible explanations” for these Ouija board messages). The result is, in a sense, to normalize the AIDS memoir, to take it out of the box of the literature of oppression and protest (clearly inappropriate for creatures as privileged as Merrill and Jackson).

The politics of Lurie's own appropriation of these two lives are complicated, but any objection is trumped, I think, by her enormous literary skill and honesty. There is a splendid insularity in this slender book: Its great charm is that it is so self-aware of its own enclosed literary world. In a sense, this memoir is Lurie's own Ouija board, through which she shares one final, intimate conversation with her much-missed familiar spirits.