The Wooden Sea is another novel seamed with pop culture, though Jonathan Carroll's take on our world is at once more nostalgic and more hopeful. His hero, Frannie McCabe, is also a public servant - a small town cop, the police chief of Crane's View, the fictional Westchester County village he terrorized as a teenager. Frannie - who first appeared in Carroll's 1998 Kissing the Beehive - has grown up to be a good guy, middle-aged and happily married. He's a sucker for lost souls - a three-legged stray dog, the town idiot - the kind of cop who happily still exists, maybe even in Westchester.

Like all good guys, he's headed for a fall. It comes when the three-legged dog, Old Vertue, dies on him and Frannie dutifully hauls the body off to bury it himself in the woods. Old Vertue stays dead, but he won't stay buried: he shows up again in the trunk of Frannie's car. From this inexplicable event, The Wooden Sea cascades into a shimmering, often brilliant shower of strange and beautiful set pieces. Frannie's self-destructive teenage self appears, and not only moves in with Frannie but falls in love with his stepdaughter. A high school honors student dies of a heroin overdose; when Frannie is called to the death scene, he finds that her notebook is filled with eerie drawings that presage the bizarre events in his own life. Aliens appear, whose interest in Frannie is benign but not necessarily in his best interest. In an effort to aid them, he ends up meeting not just his past selves but his future self as well, sometimes all at the same time, and his hometown of Crane's View - past, present, future - flashes by him like the images in a child's flip book.

Carroll has a remarkable ability to reproduce the clarity and lucidity of one of those dreams that make perfect sense while you are asleep, but which defy any attempt at logic once awake. His gift for the everyday is extraordinary, too, as well as his powerful evocation of complex characters grappling with issues as disparate as time travel and their own mortality. In Carroll's hands, small details of pop culture become the grace notes that define a world and that world's passing, underscoring G. K Chesterton's observation that "what is loved becomes immediately what can be lost."


A teenage girl overdoses on heroin but what flattens you are her socks with white hearts on them. A man wraps his silver car around a tree killing him and his whole family, but what makes it unforgettable is that that song you love, "Sally Go Round the Roses," is still playing on the radio in the wreck when you get to it. A blue New York Mets baseball cap spotted with blood on a living room floor, the scorched family cat in the yard of the burnt house . . . These are what you remember . . . "

The Wooden Sea is in many ways an extended litany - liturgy, almost - of what Frannie McCabe remembers. Each encounter with his adolescent and, later, even younger self, summons a Proustian recall of the world those earlier Frannies inhabited. His father, "Mr. Drip Dry, cap-toed oxford shoes from Florshein, Robert Hall suit, one whiskey before dinner and never more." The local movie theater; a vintage Briggs and Stratton lawnmower; even the menus in a diner, "turquoise with thick gold lettering . . . stuck behind each jukebox selector down the counter" - middle-aged Frannie relishes them all, with that intensity usually reserved for deathbed visions. But Frannie isn't sentimental. He remembers exactly how much of an asshole the young Frannie was, and nothing can mitigate his horror at confronting his seventy-something self in a future Vienna - "Had I changed into an old golfer? Shriveled hands, Hush Puppies, and red pants? Holy shit!"

Ultimately, the aliens and their need for Frannie's help is less involving than Frannie's own delight and regret at facing all of his selves - the good, the bad, the just plain crummy. There are a few serious omissions to Carroll's litany of Westchester's past pleasures - Zagnuts but not Clark Bars? Claude Kirschner but not Sandy Becker? Not to mention that many of the once-small towns between Dobbs Ferry and Goldens Bridge have been destroyed by teardowns and the construction of the ubiquitous McMansions. A middle-income guy like Frannie McCabe might not recognize the old neighborhood, let alone live in it.

The Wooden Sea ends as it began, with clods of earth being shovelled into a grave. It's melancholy, moving meditation on age, the inevitability of change, and the wisdom of acceptance in the face of death, "the most frightening word in the human vocabulary." "After a heavy rain the world is different for a while," Frannie muses at one point. After reading one of Jonathan Carroll's novels, the world is different, too.