GOOD-BYE AND AMEN opens when the children of Laurus and Sydney
Moss, protagonists of Beth Gutcheon’s LEEWAY COTTAGE, meet up
at the cottage --- actually the large, rambling home of their youth
--- to divvy up the possessions left behind by their deceased
parents.

Eleanor, the oldest daughter, arrives with her husband, the
down-to-earth, no-nonsense-allowed Bob, and their children, Adam,
Annie, Nora and Charlesie. Monica, the neglected middle child, is
there with her prickly husband, lawyer-turned-Episcopal priest
Norman, their daughter, Edie, and Norman’s daughter, Sylvie.
His son, Sam, is out on the coast.

The coast is also the home of younger brother Jimmy Moss, the
prodigal son who made a hash, perhaps literally, of his early life
but now is chief creative officer of a successful computer game
company. He brings to the “middle-aged orphan’s
lottery” his wife, Josslyn, a California girl whom the family
thinks has more spirit than intellect, and their oddly named
children, Regis and Virgil.

As the middle-aged children and their families settle into Leeway
Cottage and some nearby satellite buildings, we follow their story
through snippets of recollections arranged to read like nonfiction.
So convincing are the stories that I found myself checking the book
jacket several times to make sure it really was a novel.

Through bits and bites provided by the family, their friends and
colleagues, and even a narrator from the world beyond, we follow
along as the Moss children piece together their past, try to make
sense of their parents’ seemingly mismatched marriage, reveal
through their feelings about certain possessions a great deal about
themselves, and travel along into the future.

Gutcheon is such a skillful writer that the recollections never
seem forced, and they are doused with profundity and humor in equal
measure: “Three grown children come together…to divide
up the contents of the house they grew up in. Was there ever a
scene more fraught with possibility for bloodless injuries, sepsis
in wounds no sane person wants to reopen? They’d have been
better off burning the house down. But they hadn’t. So few
do.”

I disagree with the otherworldly narrator on that one: burning the
house down wasn’t really necessary. The pains of the Moss
children are not those caused by long-forgotten horrors or deadly
secrets; they are the ordinary, but no less excruciating, kind
experienced in the course of daily living with people who are
flawed: the careless parent, the narcissistic spouse, the
off-handed snatching away of something that meant the world to
someone else. Long-resented betrayals that, it turns out,
weren’t. Long-trusted relationships that turn out to be
betrayals.

These are the thorny paths the Moss children trod through as they
simultaneously build their lives and their insights into
them.

Meanwhile, the elderly Mosses are adjusting to the afterlife in a
manner that Gutcheon makes highly credible. Her masterful technique
creates an absolute sense of realism in this book, which uses other
novel ways to add to the illusion: an album of family portraits and
snapshots purports to be the photo gallery Eleanor’s daughter
Nora is putting together, and a clever ending section gives the
“Biographies of Contributors” in such detail --- and
with such wit --- that one has to remind oneself these are all
creations of Gutcheon’s imagination. Who could seem more real
than the first entry, Adam Applegate, who “attended the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then law school at the
University of Virginia. He currently practices tax law in
Washington, D.C., at the firm of O’Melveny & Myers. He is
learning to cook Chinese food, which he especially enjoys because
of all the manly chopping with big sharp knives.”

GOOD-BYE AND AMEN is a literary triumph that doesn’t get in
its own way and can be enjoyed as a truly entertaining page-turner
that tells a wallop of a story about a family that is unique and,
then again, just like the rest of us.