The Mansions of Limbo

This is a collection of stories about people who are almost happy, stuck in a kind of beatitude that does not beatify. They seemed doomed to pursue happiness in marginal places only to find that bliss is doled out in measured amounts. Hankering for satisfaction in a shifting world, they live lives of unquiet desperation: a connoisseur of oriental culture erotically smitten by a Japanese goldfish; a specialist in classics pursuing a student whose profile matches one on a Roman coin, itself the image of his dead son; identical twins whose loss of their brothers draws them together through an obituary ad; a pope whose heart transplant has him making strange, post-operative choices; a satiric theologian whose wit earns him a place on the Index of forbidden books; an Abyssinian cat who passes for a Coptic Christian. The premise of each story begins as wildly implausible, proves arguable until the conclusion becomes incontestable. The characters may be stuck, but "better a mansion in limbo," they argue "than a high-rise in heaven." By refusing to say what is bad or good, the last story leaves it to circumstance to assess the outcome. It seems to say that we all struggle with divided lives, engaging on earth in a shuttle diplomacy between limbo and heaven.