[In the following review, Maliszewski offers a positive assessment of Being Dead.]

After Celice and Joseph, the married zoologists at the center of Jim Crace's novel [Being Dead], die in the first paragraph, their bodies spend the rest of the book concealed by the tall grass and sand dunes along Baritone Bay. Crabs, flies, ants, and gulls locate the bodies and treat the pair as any other object in the natural world; they are potential food, possible shelter, a good place to leave eggs. Six days pass, and Joseph's hand never lets go of Celice's ankle. In the work of another writer, this would indicate his unending devotion to her, a sign of a love that survives through the torrential rains, periodic tides, and early stages of decomposition—survives even death. Crace's novel, however, begins with the less sentimental premise that for the zoologists there is death and nothing after it. The book discourages every easy eulogy for the couple. Their love is not without trouble. They're difficult, sleep in separate beds, think frequently of being alone. Writing against the comforts of condolence cards and pop music, Crace investigates death with what-if premises and Socratic questions. He blocks every convenient exit, discouraging escapes out the door of “everything happens for a reason” or “at least they're going someplace better now.” Crace's language is as meticulous as his methods. All the metaphors for their injured bodies point not toward romantic mystery, but the natural world. Joseph's brain is “a honeycomb … exposed below the thin bark of a log by someone with a trenching spade.” His heart beats not as the seat of emotion but like a “hatching sopbug.” The care Crace takes does not result in lives of little mystery determined solely by chemistry. Rather an unsparing eye to what remains or can be remembered without embellishment offers the only consolation and grace.