Mercury Rising.

The Heaven of Mercury, by Brad Watson (Norton, 288 pp., $23.95)

Brad Watson's collection of short stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men, gained him accolades, a national audience, and a teaching gig at Harvard. Though a justly praised book, it could never have prepared readers for what was to come. With his debut novel, The Heaven of Mercury, a finalist for the National Book Award, he has made one of those quantum leaps that so many great writers surprise us with.

It is a novel of ambition, maturity, and depth, framed in seamless and eloquent prose, and it lays claim to greatness. Set in Mercury, Mississippi-something of a fictional stand-in for Watson's hometown of Meridian, Mississippi-the novel begins in the present but ultimately covers most of the past century as seen through the lives of various Mercury residents. Structurally, Watson sets time spinning-lunging forward here and two-stepping backward there-but such fragmentation does not come across merely as a literary conceit. It instead reads as a cogent attempt to grant the reader an almost God-like perspective, in which lives, years, and events, past and present, are viewed contemporaneously. Every part of Watson's world is always alive, always present. Long-dead forebears and freshly arrived descendants coexist in the thick and teeming texture of his story.

We first encounter the main character, Finus Bates, when he is in his eighties. A wise and congenial fellow, he hosts a morning radio talk show, runs the local newspaper, and writes knowing and charming obituaries as friends and family members slowly die away. His hometown is decaying, as are its residents, and Finus realizes he is in a sense one of the last to go. He therefore sees himself as the public custodian of Mercury's collective memory, but in a town the size of Mercury, the lines between public and private are always blurred. With each death, Finus is again forced to review the ways in which he is connected with members of his community. In the end, this amounts to a glorious revelation, but it is not without its dark side. Finus is likeable but flawed, and at least one of his youthful mistakes affects him, and others, throughout his days.

As a young man, he fell in love with the vibrant Birdie Wells. She married another young man in town, Earl Urquhart, and though Finus eventually married and even had a son, he never stopped loving Birdie. What compromises Finus is that, with one exception, he never really made his love for Birdie known, never fought for her. His indecision had consequences not just for himself but for Birdie as well, who wound up in a largely loveless marriage.

Finus himself comes to see his life "as a long journey through a tangled wood, all as if in a semiconscious dream, a pretension of life." A pretension of life is very close to no life at all. Avis, Finus's wife, knows that full well: She becomes so embittered by their sham marriage, and the knowledge that Finus has all of his life held a torch for her best friend, that on her deathbed she tells Finus that he has ruined her life. Other characters fare no better. They struggle under the burden of their own transgressions, or suffer owing to the transgressions of others, or writhe in a web of torment made of strands woven by both themselves and others. Creasie, the Urquharts' maid, is raped by Earl's father, a sinister fraud full of bile and bluster. When she discovers she's pregnant, she goes to an old medicine woman who practices herbal remedies; the baby is aborted, but so is Creasie's ability ever to have children again. When Creasie attempts to kill wicked old Mr. Urquhart by poisoning his coffee, his son Earl-Birdie's philandering husband-drinks the coffee instead, pronounces it the worst he has ever tasted, goes to chop wood, and has a fatal heart attack.

The Heaven of Mercury is, then, a novel of missed chances and outright crimes. Yet, amazingly, it is also a novel of deep optimism and enduring inspiration.

What saves Finus and the others in the story may be described as the long view-the fact that most people amount to more in this life, for better and for worse, than they suppose; and furthermore, that death is a transition and not a terminus. The Heaven of Mercury cannot be understood without coming to terms with these ideas; they are much more than a backdrop, they are shimmering and omnipresent. And the artfulness with which Watson has spiritually supercharged the air his characters breathe is the primary reason this novel is exceptional.

Parnell, the town mortician, provides some of the most memorable meditations: "Those who would embrace the beautiful dead are most open to the living, have nothing to fear, neither loss nor oblivion. The world was flesh and blood and bone, and through the blessed privilege of sensual touch lay contact with the spiritual world. The air is adrift with what presences are left behind." At one point he tells his new bride: "When I see the dead lying alone and unadorned on my preparation table, they look to me like they are God's children once again. To me they are beautiful as babies, and it is my privilege to place them, like the midwife, into God's hands." The novel is bursting with reminders of this sort. Never for a moment are the confines of birth and death allowed to stand as bookends; they are only bookmarks, and there is always more to the story.

For some, Watson's sensibility may seem almost macabre, an unseemly obsession with death and spirits. For others, his vision of immortality may appear to supplant rigor with sentimentality. Mercury's animals, for instance, can be carriers of human spirits; some human spirits are still trapped in their graves, biding their time for one reason or another; some are described in poetical terms that charm but do not convince. For these reasons, the novel has been described as a blending of Southern gothic and magic realism. That may be true as far as it goes, but Watson's effects are something more than atmospheric-in this book the fact that people continue beyond the grave offers a genuine prospect of redemption.

The author isn't trying to delineate, in any literal way, the landscape of life after death, but that does not mean he views that landscape as somehow less than real. To risk being reductive-and one is always reductive when dealing with a work of art-his story amounts to a giddy offensive against the materialist sensibility that has become second nature to most of us. This novel wrests readers from that desiccated worldview.

In a spiritually plush story one might expect spiritually plush prose, and the novel does not disappoint in this regard. Even the adulterous cad Earl Urquhart gets a splendid sendoff: "Wanting to reach a hand out for the axe there in the graying film of his vision, not inches from his eye yet as if across some vast and light bent field at the end of a long day, piecemeal light scattering the air like mercury from a broken thermometer skittling across the floor." Heart attacks aren't much fun, of course, but aesthetically speaking, that's not a bad way to go. Watson's gift for description, whether of things earthly or heavenly, is remarkable throughout. In Birdie's later years, her skin is described as "soft and malleable as a plucked dove's." Finus goes to visit a witch who has a face "like an old burnt knot of lighter pine within which two milky pools of hardened sap regarded him calmly." Even as commonplace a thing as birdsong is invested with delightful heft: "The birds had begun their singing and their calls, a tuning up of the world."

Sooner or later all of the characters in the novel come to realize the animated loveliness that surrounds them. For some this understanding comes early, for others late; for some in this life, for others in the next. But eventually the charming design comes through, and for all of their problems and disappointments, the characters understand that they are confronted with a multitude of blessings. Shortly before Finus dies he takes a trip to the Mississippi coast. The last lines of the novel find him lying in the sand, noticing a bush "filled with preening monarch butterflies, migrated there from South America. . . . They seemed to shiver under his rapt attention. He felt such an outpouring of love for them, he thought he would weep. They seemed hardly able to contain their delight that he was gazing upon their beautiful wings." A sinner like Finus knows that there is but one response to such a vision: gratitude. Readers will be thankful as well.