SOURCE: Maliszewski, Paul. Review of Being Dead, by Jim Crace. Review of Contemporary Fiction 20, no. 3 (fall 2000): 145.

In the following review, Maliszewski offers a positive assessment of Being Dead.

After Celice and Joseph, the married zoologists at the center of Jim Crace's novel [Being Dead], die in the first paragraph, their bodies spend the rest of the book concealed by the tall grass and sand dunes along Baritone Bay. Crabs, flies, ants, and gulls locate the bodies and treat the pair as any other object in the natural world; they are potential food, possible shelter, a good place to leave eggs. Six days pass, and Joseph's hand never lets go of Celice's ankle. In the work of another writer, this would indicate his unending devotion to her, a sign of a love that survives through the torrential rains, periodic tides, and early stages of decomposition—survives even death. Crace's...