[In the following excerpt, Banville offers a mixed assessment of Women and Ghosts, which he finds characteristically well-written despite its uneven weight and interest.]

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Why do we find ghost stories more pleasurable than frightening? Perhaps because they lull us into a state of coziness by turning our worst fears into the stuff of entertainment. In the ghost story the terrors of childhood and of mankind's primitive past are transformed into a kind of joke—a jest, or gest. As in all jokes, however, there is in this process an element of the scandalous. In his essay “The ‘Uncanny,’”¹ Freud cites Schelling's definition of the word: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light,” and goes on to say, revealing as he so often does his debt to Nietzsche:

All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and remote conditions; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of piety.

Freud adduces this operation as an example of psychological “surmounting,” as distinct from repression, of primitive belief. The distinction, however, does not imply a greater degree of success.

Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition under which the uncanniness arises here is unmistakable. We, or our primitive forefathers, once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought: but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. …

All of the stories in [Brad] Leithauser's anthology testify to the fact that there is no such creature as a ghost story writer: there are only writers (or, as in the case of M. R. James, scholars) who now and then aspire, or stoop, depending on your opinion of the genre, to write tales of the supernatural. Alison Lurie is a respected novelist and critic, and an expert on children's literature. She is also a professor at Cornell University. The stories in Women and Ghosts are well-crafted, artful, sly, often witty, and curiously insubstantial. They are not so much ghost stories as camouflaged observations on the position of women in this time of transvaluation of gender values. As the narrator of one of the stories has it, “I believe women have to take responsibility for other women, even ones they don't much like.” So here is “Ilse's House,” in which a young woman who is about to marry an older divorcé is haunted by the admonitory ghost of his former wife; “The Pool People,” in which a garrulous mother-in-law is dragged down to death in her own swimming pool by the ghosts of a pair of workmen she mistreated; “Fat People,” which is about, well, you can guess; “Waiting for Baby,” which tells of a hitherto barren woman who, in India with her husband to try to adopt a child, pays shamefaced obeisance to the goddess Lakshmi and thereafter conceives; and so on.

The best, and certainly the most interesting, story here is “The Double Poet,” in which a fey performance-poet (“I believe I'll wear the midnight-blue cape again—it has such a fine sweep and flow—and alternate the white lace dress and the sea-green silk that the interviewer in Washington said made me look like a classical sibyl”) suffers the gradual usurpation of her gift and her career by a mysterious double, who goes from success to success while the poet herself declines into silence and becomes that most despised of creatures, an ordinary woman: “She wears reading glasses and has a partial plate.” It is a nice, subversive study of ambition and self-delusion which, like life itself, ends badly.

Alison Lurie has always had a gift for combining genuine warmth with a certain biting sharpness, but too often here the warmth becomes woolly (literally so in one story, in which a young man studying Wordsworth at Grasmere turns into a sheep) and the asperity decays. Her prose, as we would expect, is always cool, deft, elegant, and sometimes smoothly ravishing, as in this description of the fatal pool in “The Pool People”:

Because it was so deep, and heavily shaded most of the day, it hadn't become stale and warm at the end of the season. The water remained limpidly cool, with a shifting pattern in its depths, white reflections on aquamarine like delicate wire netting. Its constant flow was silky, sensual, caressing; and the hum of the filter peaceful, almost soporific.

Note

1. “Das ‘Unheimliche,’” Albert Dickson, editor, The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 14, Art and Literature, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985).