Here’s a happier part of Mr. Schaffert’s story: he’s got a flair for writing fanciful titles. He uses that gift to excellent effect in his fourth book, “The Coffins of Little Hope.” He concocts an imaginary series of young adult books that have supposedly taken the world by storm. They’re known as Miranda-and-Desirees because of the two plucky sisters who are their heroines. The institution that Miranda and Desiree have made famous sounds almost as well known as Hogwarts. But it’s “Rothgutt’s Asylum for Misguided Girls.”
Mr. Schaffert’s own narrative drops a number of nicely mischievous references to the 10 books in the Miranda-and-Desiree series. No. 4 is “The Dead Weights of the Doll’s Head.” No. 6 is the “Christmas-themed novel, the one in which Miranda and Desiree fall into a crack in the frozen lake and meet watery phantoms in long, flowing scarves skating figure eights across the underside of the lake’s layer of ice.” No. 11, called “The Coffins of Little Hope,” is the last book in the series. It’s just about to come down the pike.
As Mr. Schaffert’s own tale begins, fans of the series are in a frenzy. The gut-punch of the series’ end is imminent, and the book itself is physically nearby. It is being printed in a super-secure site in a quaint and dusty little Nebraska town where the local paper is called the County Paragraph and the publisher’s column features such folksy archetypes as “the missus,” “little sis” and “sonny-boy.” That paper’s longtime obituary writer is a tart, unsentimental, unstoppable 83-year-old great-grandmother. Her byline is “S Myles,” but everyone calls her Essie.
Essie is in an excellent position to narrate Mr. Schaffert’s book. She knows just about everyone in the area, whether those people are alive or dead. At fond moments in the story, she recalls some of the obituaries that count as her greatest hits. And she is caustic enough to appreciate the crazy media circus that comes to town once a half-mad woman named Daisy claims that her daughter, Lenore, has vanished. Something about the anxiety that accompanies the imminent death of the Miranda-and-Desiree books turns the disappearance of even one girl into a hot-button issue.
There’s a lot of plot to “The Coffins of Little Hope.” But Mr. Schaffert’s style is so gossamer-light that the story elements don’t become cumbersome. His book can accommodate a large cast of characters who bump into one another with an almost screwball regularity. The only one whose presence is underrepresented is Lenore. Why doesn’t Lenore have a birth certificate? Daisy is so nutty that some townspeople suspect Lenore may never have existed at all.
Mr. Schaffert’s sly wit and frank affection for his characters can make him sound like a very American Alexander McCall Smith. So the mystery about Lenore isn’t really this book’s main concern; it would much rather ramble. It would rather dwell, for instance, on the secretive author of the Miranda-and-Desiree books, the reason he has demanded that they be printed in an especially environmentally friendly way, and the upshot of that requirement: The books smell like cut dandelions crossed with cinnamon rolls.
Mr. Schaffert also throws in a minor plot thread about another writer: a revered, musty woman named Myrtle Kinglsey Finch who won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for something called “The Ladies of the Katydids.” Finch aficionados, who sound more pious than the Lenore-stalkers and less frantic than the Miranda-and-Desiree fans, are determined to preserve their favorite author’s hometown “by killing it, inch by inch, and casting it in amber.” As he has with earlier books, Mr. Schaffert fills this one with Nebraskans who get lost in “nostalgia for a time that never was.”
“The Coffins of Little Hope” makes the most of its insular little atmosphere. Everyone knows everyone else’s habits — and is apt to have opinions about them. As Essie says about her grandson, Doc: “He took to wearing a linen suit and straw porkpie hat, elements of style that, in my honest opinion, hurt him in the community.” As a younger woman with a possible romantic interest in Doc tells him: “It suits you, the hair that’s going away. You have a good forehead for it.” And as Doc warns Tiff, who is his niece and Essie’s great-granddaughter, about Essie: “She’s already outlived two husbands. A son. A daughter-in-law. She’s clearly cursed. You should be afraid to be around her.”
A faint but important frisson of fear runs all through this seeming lightheartedness, giving the book a spooky undercurrent. After all, Essie is one of what she calls the town’s “death merchants.” The snicker about Doc’s suit and hat is directly preceded by the news that his parents died when their car went off a bridge. The young are made to seem old, and vice versa. And many of the women in this mortality-haunted, four-generation story have been coincidentally damaged by the disappearances of their mothers.
“Generation after generation of parents lost, of abandonment — starting with my mother’s death at my birth — had left us all stunted,” Essie says in one of the book’s brief moments of complete seriousness. “It wasn’t funny.” And yet, in Mr. Schaffert’s world, somehow it is.