Finn’s narrative constitutes the core of the novel, and for a while it’s unclear why we’re cutting away to Libby at all. Eventually, Finn and Lily make their way to Tyler after a long drive through the night and end up staying at the inn—and in the room that seemingly belonged to our maybe-Booth. The plots intersect when Finn finds and reads Libby’s diary. This is the only explicit connection between the two storylines. Any further connection must be inferred and is difficult to reconcile without equating the personal loss of loved ones with the large-scale bloodbath of the Civil War and the traumas endured during the Reconstruction period, which I hope isn’t the novel’s intention. Maybe there is something to be said, in the layering of these two narratives, about continuing to live after devastation; about private and national mourning; about the lies inherent in any official account—but one is left wondering whether the narratives do, in fact, speak to each other at all or even whether they’re designed to. We are reading not only a ghost story but a story that is itself spectral.

In some ways, though, how and why these two storylines relate is beside the point. Like all good ghost tales, the book is rife with nostalgia, and mostly in a good way: We’re treated to baseball, apple trees, the Civil War, a traveling freak show, lore about Lincoln’s assassination. Alongside the predictable and comforting Americana, a series of stranger images also begins to accumulate. Does the main character have sex with what might be a corpse instead of a person? He does. Does the wryly funny innkeeper murder someone? Yes. One might wonder—as Finn leaves Lily in Knoxville “in full bioluminescence, shining from her own uncajolable deadness,” and as Libby contemplates gluing a dead man’s eyes shut—whether it’s even possible to fully understand what’s going on.

Yet one thing in the novel is constant: humor. Like Agnes in New York, Lily tries to get us to laugh—she is, after all, a laugh therapist by training. But her jokes can be a little grim. “Two of our mass shooters were named Dylan,” she observes. “Music is worthless.” When Finn asks her what death is, she replies, “It’s sort of what you make of it.” Her jokes feel canned, or at least inadequate to the moment. But this seems deliberate on Moore’s part. Lily is aware on some level that she’s compensating, that her efforts to lighten the mood can only fail. Toward the end of the book, as Finn drops her off, he says to her in anger, “But your whole vocation, your clown thing, was supposed to be a distraction from death! That was your job.” “I guess I just sucked at it,” Lily replies. “But you knew that.”

The funny woman contorting herself to make light of a shitty situation is often really a way for Moore to write about sadness. Her first novel, the ingeniously constructed Anagrams, follows Benna Carpenter and her friends Eleanor and Gerard (imaginary and real, respectively) as they use humor to navigate shifting dynamics and loss. In Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, we meet a teenage girl named Berie and her friend Sils, who come of age one summer in upstate New York when Sils needs an abortion. They too turn to jokes to avoid acknowledging the gravity of a situation. “We were never very witty as girls, but we thought we were,” says the narrator in a moment of self-awareness. “We loved to laugh violently, convulsively, no sound actually coming out until suddenly we’d have to gasp in a braying way for breath.”

In A Gate at the Stairs, Moore’s 2009 novel, we follow a restaurant owner, Sarah, as she adopts a baby late in midlife and hires a college student named Tassie to help out with childcare. Awkward jokes ensue as Sarah and Tassie navigate their differences in social class. Often the two joke with each other nervously, sometimes meaninglessly, when a deeper connection seems impossible. “A distant memory flew to my head: a note passed to me from a mean boy in seventh grade,” Tassie recalls. “Laugh less, it commanded.”

In I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, Finn and Lily joke around to distract from their grief or to make it more bearable. The jokes tend to be confounding rather than funny, but they also bring a broken couple back together. That Finn ends up bathing Lily’s likely dead body in a room formerly occupied by a person who may have been John Wilkes Booth is ridiculous. And yet it is also tender (perhaps disturbingly so):

When he moved the washcloth down one arm the skin of her hand, soaking in the water, seemed to come off a bit and he slipped it back on like a glove. She was now sheer as the rice wrap on a spring roll, the bean sprouts and chopped purple cabbage visible inside her.

Is this even happening? Are the events of the book to be taken at face value? Can the reader accept that Lily is actually back from the dead, or is Finn doing something far darker with her body? Is he carting around a corpse that he imagines is alive? Is he lugging it up the stairs at an inn and doing things to it in a bedroom that John Wilkes Booth once slept in? These questions remain unresolved—and somehow, that’s OK. The novel ends up elegiac and oddly sweet. If the book can be said to coalesce, it might be around the idea of the American death drive and the ghosts that come with it. Lily really wants to die; she has attempted suicide a few times in the past. The way she finally accomplishes it is grisly. Meanwhile, others are dying whether they want to or not—at the hands of assassins or cancer or a terrible civil war—and while it is 2016 in the novel’s main narrative, it’s hard not to think of Covid around the corner. But the humor drive persists throughout, though it is of a heartbroken variety. Even amid all the loss, at least we have bad jokes.