Passive Intruder

An intriguing premise shapes Upchurch's new novel (after The Flame Church), in which he subtly explores the ideas of haunting and being haunted, of absence being ``as much of a shape as presence is.'' After 24-year-old Susan Pond marries 39-year-old photojournalist Walker Popman in Seattle, Susan believes that they are being followed on their honeymoon cross-country train trip by a woman she sees everywhere-but whom Walker never notices. More alarming is that, after Walker's untimely death, Susan experiences palpably vivid hallucinations in which she is following a young couple on their own honeymoon. Fearful for her sanity, Susan goes to see Dr. Sidney Plume, a gay psychiatrist who had not only treated Walker but had also been in love with him. Plume, unfortunately, is given short shrift by Upchurch. Although he's a central character, he never comes alive on the page, even as he grapples with the way AIDS is ravaging his friends and community, recalls his sexual awakening and ponders his reasons for becoming a shrink. Another problem is that Walker, as an object of utter fascination for both Susan and Plume, is overexamined, most blatantly in the retellings of his extensive and fairly uninteresting therapy sessions with Plume. But the most crucial character, Susan, is believable, and her strange plight equally so-that is, to discover whom she is haunting, and why. Upchurch's descriptions of concrete places and of Susan's elusive, illusory ``reveries'' are richly toned, merging the real with the marvelous, and his unique plumbing of death's effect on the living is both sophisticated and frankly cathartic. (Oct.)