By any typical measure, Mary Kay Zuravleff’s The Frequency of Souls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages, $ 23) is not a very good book. A tale of love, death, and refrigerators, this short first novel by a thirty- six-year-old former editor at the Smithsonian is not so much full of holes as full of protuberances: little knobs of irrelevant metaphor, subplot, and character that scrape and rattle as the story rolls along. The author has an uncertain ear, and at least once a chapter the narrating voice goes badly out of tune. (The book ends with a sentence — “The rubbery skin resisted the initial pressure of his molars and then burst open to his insistent bite, inviting him to eat of the cool, refreshing fruit” — that I had to read three times before I could believe she meant it.) Like those comedians who nudge you after they tell a joke, Zuravleff can’t just use her symbolic devices: She has to explain them in case somebody missed the point. Her grasp of structure is shaky, and her sense of plot development a little weak.
In fact, while The Frequency of Souls is not a terrible novel, it falls so demonstrably short that the only interesting question I could find to ask is why I loved the book so much — why I read it in a single sitting, smiling the whole time, and why I’ve recommended it a dozen times in the days since I finished.
