Mourners Below, which appeared this past summer, is Purdy's tenth full-length novel, and the book appears likely to share the same fate as its immediate predecessors. If critics can be likened to rock climbers, then Mourners Below is a sheer scree slope, offering countless apparent critical footholds, but none which is strong enough to bear the weight of complete interpretation. The book seems to call out for all manner of critical approaches—psychoanalytic, archetypal, even phenomenological—yet it cannot be made to cohere in any of these systems. The book remains elusive, and this fact, while certainly inconvenient for the critic, is perhaps the novel's greatest strength. Unlike many works that fit neatly into the syntax of a specific critical language, Mourners Below is a work that cannot be easily assimilated intellectually. It retains its mysteries to the very end….

[The plot] sounds very bleak and melodramatic on...