Swan Song: An Odyssey

The norovirus is going around the British cruise ship Amphitrite, and further danger is posed by the very real possibility of a pirate attack. But much more daunting to Jessie Drake, the ship's physician, is accepting the recent death of Kat, her partner of 20 years. Lisa Alther's Swan Song: An Odyssey is a pleasantly bouncy ride down the conduits of later-life grief.

When Jessie, who considers herself to be in "early old age," flew from Vermont, where she lives and works, to Hong Kong to fill in for the Amphitrite's ailing physician for six weeks, she was expecting something "along the lines of the Love Boat." To be fair, the Amphitrite has its share of telegenic characters, including a former priest turned high-seas gigolo and a World War II veteran and his much younger, much randier wife. But Jessie's dealings on board aren't as lighthearted as she had anticipated: the ship's lead medical officer, who did his residency with Jessie and got her the Amphitrite job, wants to revisit their decades-old botched romance, and the Amphitrite's chanteuse may want more from Jessie than she feels ready to give.

Swan Song proceeds not at a brisk clip but languidly, accommodating not only romantic entanglements but various characters' agonized introspection, a shipboard mystery and sightseeing along the Mediterranean. Alther, whose previous novels include the feminist classic Kinflicks, has looked into the heart of late-in-life grief and divested it of the maudlin; the result is something smarter, darker and better. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

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