Passing On

A retired second-rate basketball player starts a travel service for the terminally ill in Tom LeClair's Passing On. Michael Keever, hero of LeClair's earlier novel Passing Off, is the head of Terminal Tours, which takes the old and infirm on their last earthly trips. But client mishaps, a lawsuit and Keever's increasing weariness with the near dead make him decide to give up the business-until an old friend, Alice, asks him to accompany her on a world tour of famous tombs before she succumbs to kidney cancer. LeClair's enigmatic, amusing prose is engrossing, though the novel's stunted ending leaves readers stranded.