Sometimes a novel’s means are so strange, however compelling its final effect on the reader, that a straightforward account of it will be most helpful. I’ve read, or part-read, this novel three times now. On the first reading I gave up, shaking my head. On the second I got to the end, but thought it absurdly wilful, self-absorbed and idiosyncratic to the point of whimsy. The third reading – something, after all, must have drawn me back – exerted an appalling power, and I emerged shaken, troubled, but also consoled. Take your pick. This is a book that is going to divide people, and one that can look very different to the same reader in different lights.

It begins with a letter, written in the late 19th century by a woman to her sister. She runs a boarding house, and a handsome stranger is paying her notice. This strand runs through the novel to a climax of great violence, and a rum consideration of the uses people can be put to after death – their ashes strewn on garden paths, their corpses preserved and lugged around the country as a raree-show. Novels that alternate past and present events are commonplace; but this one is striking for the fact that the connection between the manuscript letters and the present-day characters is casual and almost meaningless.

In that present-day narrative, a teacher, Finn, is summoned to his brother’s deathbed in a New York hospice. Finn has lost his job as a result of refusing the advances of the headmaster’s wife. In a chapter of regret and reminiscence, he and his brother Max exchange memories, jokes and observations that need no explanation and aren’t curbed by good taste. There is a beautifully caught sense that, in the room of a dying man, there is both all the time in the world to talk at leisure and not much time left:

’Member when Mom used to take the other Max’s craft projects?’
‘She used that other Max’s ashtray for years.’
‘Did her in.’
‘Yup. Death by other Max.’

Finn’s ex, Lily, is far away; she is pathologically depressed, works as a children’s entertainer and has attempted suicide.

The novel as a form doesn’t like two adjacent, unconnected deaths, and avoids it as much as it avoids having two characters of the same name, but Max’s imminent death and Lily’s much-canvassed one circle each other. ‘When two or three people were dying together, it had a chance of becoming a comedy. Not a big chance, but some.’ There is a phone call from a member of Lily’s book club, demanding Finn’s presence. He leaves Max, and on arrival at the book club convenor’s house is told that Lily has committed suicide in an institution. The scene is excruciating, and tormentedly funny: ‘I suppose it was hard on you, having Lily go off to fellate another man like that.’

Lily is already buried, in a low- environmental-impact cemetery without gravestones. Finn visits it – and there is Lily. She is indisputably dead and decaying, but is standing and talking. Finn starts to respond; in a moment they have agreed that this is no place for her, and they will go on a road trip together to find a more appropriate final resting place. That trip, and the conversations and encounters between Finn and his corpse bride and strangers along the way, take up the rest of the novel.

Moore has been at the forefront of American fiction for many years now. Her major subject is the prospect, or impact, of loss. Her previous novel, A Gate at the Stairs, probed the history of a secretive couple arrived in a new town, and culminated in an act of terrible cruelty to the child that brought them there. No one who read the novel will ever forget that sequence. Her entrancing Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? takes on the rich, rewarding subject of an intimate friendship between teenage girls, but is suffused from the start by a sense of how that friendship somehow gets lost.

Her masterpiece is probably the short- story collection Birds of America. Many of the stories in it are of pillars of existence that have gone, or may be on the verge of being lost – an aged parent on a holiday, a tiny child diagnosed with cancer, or (one of the best Christmas stories) the death of a most beloved cat. The point of this last, sublime story is that there is no loss or grief so small that it must always be passed over:

If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny mean and pointless wants.

In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the examination of loss is turned on its head, and the novel does the impossible – as it can do. It fills the absence with what is longed for, and does so with extraordinary specificity. The sparkling conversation with the dead person takes place as it ought to; even the acts of intimacy with a lover – though as Lily is now a corpse, the physical specifics could prove challenging for some. Readers may be reminded of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, the 2017 Booker prize-winner about the behaviour of the dead. For me, Moore is more compelling. She is unfailingly honest about what the grotesque and impossible situation might involve, and, unlike Saunders, never slips into what the literature of consolation might prefer to relax into. At the end of the couple’s journey, Lily says goodbye, and her body begins to fade. The distinctive Moore grain is in the unexpected, hilarious, accurate simile: ‘Her body now seemed vestigial, the lingering registration of an idea – like a man’s nipples.’

‘I’m good, thanks,’ Finn says early on, refusing the offer of a drink. But is he good? Or Max? Or Lily? Virtue and its opposite are in Moore’s mind, but not in a grandiose way – the plot is a long way from what it superficially resembles, Antigone seeking to bury her brother. Rather, it’s shown in small details, as when, for instance, an Airbnb host pretends that a glass Finn smashed is a precious object rather than a piece of tat from Pottery Barn.

It’s the honesty and specificity about the impossible that gives this moving novel its power. That impossibility may be a corpse coming back to life and going on a road trip; or it may be that everyday impossibility – that a most beloved brother, who has always been there, is here, at the end, and nothing on earth can prevent his going. Only the novel can do that, and Moore is one of the best of novelists, writing half about the hard gaze of the stars and half about the helplessness of trying to verify yourself online: ‘He was required to identify traffic lights, taxis, storefronts, crosswalks.’

It’s not often appropriate to bring in a reviewer’s personal circumstances, but in this case I think I should say that I suffered a major bereavement a few months ago, and have been living in a state of debilitating grief since January. As everyone knows, grief is terribly lonely: the one person you could talk to in full about the loss is gone. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home made perfect sense to me, despite its utter strangeness of method, and I don’t think anything but a novel could have done that. When a book reaches out and speaks to a reader so clearly, one can hardly do anything but recommend it in the highest terms.<//>