The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert

Published by Unbridled Books on April 19, 2011

The Coffins of Little Hope adds an interesting twist to the "missing child" story. Lenore has disappeared from Daisy's farm, apparently abducted by an aerial photographer who resembles (and thus comes to be known as) Elvis. But as the story gains worldwide attention (attracting reporters, psychics, and the merely curious), people start to wonder whether Lenore actually existed ... and if she did, whether Daisy is responsible for her disappearance. The townspeople don't much care about the truth; the legend of Lenore holds the hope of keeping their dying town alive. A cult-like group (the "Lenorians") begins to gather on Daisy's farm, never searching for Lenore but attesting to the reality of her existence.

The story swivels around twin fulcrums. Lenore is one. The other is a book: the eleventh and last Miranda-and-Desiree book, a popular children's series that (to maintain security) is secretly printed by the newspaper in the small Nebraska town where the novel takes place. The newspaper that does the printing is The County Paragraph; its obituary writer, 83-year-old Essie, is the novel's narrator. Wilton Muscatine, the author of the Miranda-and-Desiree series, has been corresponding for some time with Essie and eventually plays a role in the story. So does Essie's grandson, "Doc," who inherited the newspaper and now acts as its editor/publisher, a job to which he is unsuited.

Doc's sister Ivy and Ivy's daughter Tiff round out the list of important characters, all of whom are quite believable. Timothy Schaffert gives life even to his minor characters, including a Lutheran minister who is too fire-and-brimstone for his staid congregation. The rural community in which the story takes place may, like Lenore, disappear, leaving others to wonder whether it ever existed.  When the newspaper is gone, there will be no record of the townspeople's quiet lives.  When Essie is gone, there will be nobody to write the town's obituary.

As an elderly obituary writer, Essie has an interesting perspective on aging and death. One of her thoughts on the subject gives a nice taste of Schaffert's writing: "A sophisticated civilization wouldn't ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn't it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We'd make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty." A bit gloomy, perhaps, but Essie's thoughts about aging are a bit more upbeat by the novel's end.  (I loved the last paragraph.  To avoid spoilers, I won't reveal its contents, but it is worth reading the novel just to appreciate that paragraph.)

I enjoyed The Coffins of Little Hope for the characters it brings to life more than the story it tells. By the end of the novel, the story feels like an afterthought, like something not quite finished. But that's life and maybe that's Schaffert's point; sometimes questions aren't resolved, sometimes life just moves on without providing a neat ending. Sometimes it's enough just to know the people we meet along the way. Schaffert's characters are worth meeting.

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