APPROACHING THE UNKNOWABLE.

Being Dead
Jim Crace
Farrar, Straus & Giroux $21, 196 pp.

Among book titles, surely Being Dead ranks with the most intriguing. The visitor to the bookstore or the public library, ambulating through the stacks and catching a fleeting sight of the title, cannot but stop and wonder. Is this one addition to the dauntingly prolific race of "How To" books, if books they be called? What folly! Who can teach us that which no one has ever experienced and come back to tell about? Who, indeed, can expound on being dead? This is the one condition for which no instructors, no teachers exist. The one role that all of us, without exception, will one day be called to enact, but to which we shall come as ignorant neophytes. Always, and all of us, without exception, must face this reality. No theoretical foreknowledge here, and no empirical savvy, either.

For death is not empirical, but "meta-empirical," as philosophers have remarked with their pretentious language. They mean that death is not an experience, properly so called, but they find themselves at a loss for words to say what it is, this thing that transcends all possible experience. They must invent new terms that are themselves unsatisfactory, since no language can have words for what is fundamentally ineffable, undescribable, and beyond possible comparison with objects or phenomena of the empirical realm.

The curious reader takes the book in his hands and glances at the jacket: Being Dead, by Jim Crace. Is the author perhaps a metaphysician, since it belongs to that species to discourse on things that are not known, cannot be known, and which, in any case, if they were known, would probably make no difference to most of us? Or is he perhaps a theologian? Mystics and ascetics have been telling us for ages that the goal of life is to learn how to die. But we know, of course, that this is just a manner of speaking, since there is no possible learning here. The reader is therefore prepared to hear solemn speeches on resignation or sober exhortations to fortitude, when, surprise!, the lowermost line on the front of the jacket makes it all clear. The full title reads: Being Dead: A Novel.

A novel: not a technical, biomedical work, not a philosophical treatise, and not an anthology of religious meditations. Instead, a work of fiction. But is it not true that any work setting forth propositions on being dead, whether philosophical, theological, or scientific, is necessarily a work of fiction? And the converse is also true: any novel taking as its central theme the condition of being dead, will inevitably foray into the arid plains of metaphysics, the lofty realm of religion, or the unforgiving, pitiless spotlight of biomedical science.

Being Dead is all of this, as compounded by the craft and the imagination of a masterful novelist. The style is agile, precise, and vigorous. Words hit their target directly and unerringly. Images are colorful, evocative, forceful. Jim Crace, who has already won many literary awards, reasserts himself this time as supremely skilled in the difficult art of the novel. Technique is not the least of his accomplishments, and this novel displays it to the point of virtuosity. The story, which forms the sustaining framework, and the very raison d'etre of the traditional novel, takes on a more modest function here. It seems wrong to judge Being Dead by its story-telling. A critic would be misguided who concentrated his attention on the plot, the pace of its development, its climax and denouement, or the expectations or surprises that it may afford the reader.

Story there is, nonetheless: two middle-aged zoologists, husband and wife, on a sentimental trip to the beach where they had their first erotic encounter, are surprised by a robber, who murders them. The dead couple are left lying in the dunes. There, the cadavers slowly rot and deliquesce, incongruously frozen in a gesture of caress that cannot fail to evoke the somber links between eroticism and death. Then, the reader is presented with a series of gripping still-lifes, all rendered with exquisite art, in which the inanimate bodies are gradually dissolved, returned to dust, devoured by crabs and seagulls, tunnelled by insects, reclaimed by the life forms of the seashore, in a spectacle that is at once grandiose, fascinating, and frightening. And against this awe-inspiring background, there are flashbacks to the earlier life of the protagonists, without much regard for a linear chronological sequence. The novel thus acquires not merely a visual quality, but a distinctly cinematographic tone reminiscent of Alain Robbe-Grillet and the roman du regard. But even this comparison seems out of place: Crace is not classed with any literary school; he creates a school of his own; one that, in my view, is going to continue deserving praise for a long time. His novel does what only the highest form of literature can do: it mesmerizes the reader by the deployment of powerful images, which in turn force reflection long after the book has been put down.

Crace cannot tell us what being dead means. No one can. This is one of the infinite contradictions of the human condition: to be by nature curious, and to be condemned never to know. Never. We cannot even imagine, let alone see, this "beyond." But the novelist comes by and sets about collating a criminal act, two victims, their decomposing corpses, a few disjoined memories of their lives, and the desperate attempt of the victims' daughter to drown her existential anguish in sex. And by artfully arranging all this, the novelist seems to tell us that, if we pay close attention to the surroundings of death, we shall perceive absolutely nothing of death itself, but our vision of life--that other mystery--will be wondrously enhanced.

F. Gonzalez-Crussi, pathologist and writer, lives in Chicago. His latest book is There Is a World Elsewhere (Riverhead).