“Hilldale cemetery in North Bath was cleaved right down the middle, its Hill and Dale sections divided by a two-lane macadam road, originally a colonial cart path. Death was not a thing unknown to the town’s first hearty residents, but they seemed to have badly misjudged how much of it there’d be, how much ground would be needed to accommodate those lost to harsh winters, violent encounters with savages and all manner of illness. Or was it life, their own fecundity, they’d miscalculated? Ironically, it amounted to the same thing.”

The Hilldale cemetery symbolizes the mysterious relationship between The Living and the Dead: Burgeoning life inevitably entails its opposite, “amounting to the same thing.” The paradox that death is at once so imminent and so utterly incomprehensible is a central theme in the novel. The passage also contrasts the picturesque Hill—evidence of the city’s former decadence—and the ugly, banal Dale, which illustrates its recent decline.

“A banner was strung across Main Street for the Memorial Day weekend. THE NEW NORTH BATH: PARTNERING FOR TOMORROW. This was the brainstorm of Gus Moynihan, the town’s new mayor, who’d been swept into power the previous year on a tidal wave of born-again optimism, more than a decade after the demise of the Ultimate Escape Fun Park, an economic catastrophe that had ushered in a golden age of self-loathing and fiscal pessimism deeply rooted in two centuries worth of invidious comparison with Schuyler Springs, its better-looking twin and age-old rival.”

North Bath is constantly torn between pessimism and hope for the future. The Ultimate Escape Fun Park initiative, for which Beryl Peoples’s son, Clive Junior, was largely responsible, was a central focus of the first novel in the North Bath Trilogy, Nobody’s Fool. The hyperbole of the aborted theme park’s name is ironic given the town’s drabness and its disenchanted residents. The similar contrast between North Bath and its gentrified, affluent neighbor, Schuyler Springs, will be a recurrent motif throughout the novel.

“‘And what of God?’ Reverend Tunic wanted to know.

Good question, Raymer thought.

‘Does God love the shirker?’

Yes. He loves us all.

‘No!’ Tunic emphatically disagreed. ‘God does not.’

Well, fuck him, then, Raymer thought, giddy with heat and blasphemy. Shame on God.

‘Because a shirker is a coward.’

No, God is.

‘A shirker always assumes that the difficult duty of daily living is someone else’s, that the thunderclouds which darken the sun and obscure the light of reason are someone else’s problem.’

But why should clouds be anybody’s responsibility?

‘No, friends, Barton Flatt was no shirker. Shirking is not his legacy. And as he journeys to his final reward…’

Dirt? Decomposition Worms?

‘…we honor him one last time by reaffirming in his presence...”

His absence, surely.

‘…our faith. In God. In America. And in our fair city.”

As Raymer feels increasingly unwell in the heat at Judge Flatt’s funeral, he silently but mutinously answers back to Reverend Tunic’s sermon. While Tunic preaches civic responsibility based on the religious premise of reward in the afterlife, Raymer, who is undergoing an existential crisis, sees nothing after death except “dirt,” “decomposition” and “worms.