Madeleine's Ghost

From Publishers WeeklyIn a first novel of astonishing accomplishment, Girardi by turns portrays spooks, erotic love, muggers, Romanian mediums and the Catholic church with startlingly few slips and a shimmering style. A first-person account by Ned Conti, a graduate student in French history deeply involved in not writing his dissertation, the novel moves between New York and New Orleans, past and present, this side and "the other side" of death. Ned is languishing in a dangerous Brooklyn neighborhood, in an apartment haunted by an aggressive ghost (whose tricks include dropping stones from the ceiling) when, broke, he starts work as a researcher for a local Catholic priest who is hoping to spur the canonization of a 19th-century American nun. Soon, the forces of spirituality and history converge on Ned until he is almost painfully overburdened with mystery. When the suicide of a close friend pushes him to visit Antoinette, his Creole ex-girlfriend in Louisiana, Ned begins to sense that a New Orleans plantation family may hold a clue to his researches. The connections among ghost, saint and Antoinette, are wrapped up a bit too tidily, but Girardi drives his tale along with sensuous prose. The resonance with which he captures the gritty material world of New Orleans and the East Village provides a sturdy, credible spine on which to hang Ned's clash with the strange world of spirits. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalNed Conti is a New Orleans graduate student in history whose dissertation and love affair have both stalled. Hoping to resume the former and escape the latter, Conti moves to New York City and accepts a job documenting the life and works of a candidate for Catholic sainthood. That work is soon derailed by a presence haunting his apartment. This first novel switches seamlessly from past to present, from humid New Orleans to gritty New York as Conti's life is quickly consumed by forces he cannot control. First novelist Girardi has fashioned a modern ghost story that eschews graphic violence for mood, fascinating characters, and a story that opens strong and keeps building. Buy wherever good fiction is read.-?A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama, BirminghamCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.