A Fine and Private Place (1960)

It's been a while, but I loved this book when I read it. ( )

Not Beagle's best, but a very impressive first novel considering the author was only 19 when he wrote it! ( )

Beagle's first published book, at age 19, concerns a man living in a graveyard. See Goodreads reviews.

Beagle wrote this when he was 19, and for that age this is an excellent book. Certainly Beagle went on to write great fiction. But this book doesn't really do it for me. It's a very slow book and very character-driven, but the characters aren't all that interesting. There's Michael and Laura, two ghosts who cannot leave their cemetery and are slowly losing all their memories, Mr. Rebeck, who's alive but has lived in a mausoleum inside the cemetery for almost twenty years and can see ghosts, and Mrs. Klapper, who initially comes to the cemetery to visit her husband's grave but befriends Mr. Rebeck. Together, they sit around and talk about nothing much for a couple of hundred pages.

Oh, it's well-written nothing, but nothing nonetheless. I think Beagle was reaching for philosophy but fell short and landed with circular arguments. I don't much care for any of the characters, and I'm hard-pressed to describe the two ghosts, whose personalities are as transparent as their corporeal forms. Actual events happen at the end of the book, but since I never cared much about the characters, it doesn't resonate or feel worthy of emotion.
( )

While Beagle's dialogue and prose are both excellent, and the plot fairly interesting, the subject matter is just not my thing at all, being much too depressing and morbid to be an enjoyable read for me. So my rating is at about the halfway point between how good I suspect this book would be to someone whose tastes are more open to it, and how much I personally got out of it. ( )