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This comprehensive book encompasses vast tracts of psychoanalytic theory and the work of several theoreticians on the subject of mourning and how it is metabolized. Meyerowitz promises ‘close-reading’ and ‘keen-eyed attention to detail’ (p. 8) of all the texts and this is done in a masterly fashion. Furthermore, he decided not to use his own clinical experiences to illustrate or exemplify the points, but to use literary texts to help ground the ideas, one short story in particular, which are woven throughout the book. Meyerowitz declares his position, which has been developed and digested over many years of thinking and clinical practice, as well as from his earlier career as an academic in literary studies and critical theory, from the outset. He links the failure of mourning—melancholia—with the fear of loss and thus the impossibility of metabolizing it. He notes that ‘all human experience is predicated on loss’ (p. 5). He also thinks that the processing required to manage loss mirrors the digestive process and that melancholia is a kind of psychic indigestion. This is the metaphor he uses throughout the book to hold it together and to help the reader to digest what is by any measure a substantial and rich meal.
The introduction, some 26 pages, sets all this out and more, as Meyerowitz expands on his understandings and describes how poetry and prose are used to both bring something to life and to help with this digestive process. The second part of the introduction delineates how the book is organized and what the reader can hope to find there. It is in this section that the ordinary reader, who might have been concerned that a book of this size without clinical examples could be rather challenging to digest, can be reassured. The writing style brings the various authors Meyerowitz is grappling with to life; the reader begins to see that Meyerowitz is in dialogue with these theoreticians and their theories. As the book progresses one can imagine that Meyerowitz and