(I signed up for some Open Threads and decided for each one I’ll take a snapshot of a random shelf and pick one book from the photo to highlight. Please feel free to discuss adjacent books as well and critique my choice. Books!)

American author Peter S. Beagle is probably best known for The Last Unicorn, but the only thing I’ve read by him so far is A Fine and Private Place, his first novel, published in 1960 and mostly set in a New York City cemetery around the same time.

I remember really liking it when I read it, but that was a while ago, so I started a re-read this morning (thanks, Internet Archive!); alas, I’m on vacation with family and didn’t get very far before the nephews started sleepily filing out of the various bedrooms. Still, I read enough to remember why I liked it (and to be startled to learn that Beagle was only 19 when he wrote it).

Deriving its title from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,”

A Fine and Private Place is decidedly less horny than its namesake, but it is, not surprisingly, concerned with death and love and the pitfalls and possibilities of both on either side of the divide. The novel features four primary protagonists (five if we count the raven, as we should): two living (Mr. Rebeck and Mrs. Klapper) and two dead (Michael Morgan and Laura Durand). The premise is that the dead linger until they forget how to be — some fighting tooth and nail to hang on to themselves and others eager to be done with it. Mr. Rebeck can see them and speak with them, appointing himself a sort of guide to the confused, lonely, and often afraid newly dead who appear in the cemetery where he has lived in self-imposed exile for nearly 20 years, sustained by deliveries of purloined food by a somewhat reluctant and imminently practical but kind raven.

Though occasionally too on the nose and a little overlong for a novel of elegaic simplicity with little plot (in his defense, the man was 19!), the 50 pages or so I read this morning confirmed what I remember: It’s sweet, and sad, occasionally horrifying, often funny, and ultimately rather life (and death) affirming. Here, have an early scene that doesn’t spoil much:

“Death ought to be a quiet, easy thing, like love,” declares Mr. Rebeck early on, despite not having experienced either. The novel, on the other hand, posits that death and love are neither quiet, nor easy, but they’re what we have, and they’re often worth it.

Oops, the rest of the family is stirring, so . . .

Have a great Day Thread, Avocados!