THE SPEAKING STONE

Novelist and English professor Griffith finds a fruitful ground for his research into the past in a vast Cincinnati cemetery, the third largest in the country, that contains poignancies and mysteries alike.

Early on, he confesses to an avidity for obituaries—not just the ones that mark the deaths of the rich and well known, but also those about ordinary folk that “can offer the reader a sense…of the multifariousness of the paths not taken, of the range of occupational choices and ways of contributing to (or wrecking) humanity.” One such obituary commemorates the man who invented the red Solo Cup, another the Chinese-born painter who, unsung, incorporated Song dynasty conventions into his work on the Disney film Bambi. Roaming the 750-acre Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, Griffith limns a wonderland of crypts, tombs, and mausoleums tucked away in profusions of nature—1,200 species of trees and other plants and abundant wildlife. His wanderings introduce us to noteworthy figures from Cincinnati history, including a Belgian-born photographer who was there to record Ulysses S. Grant’s visit to the city with William Tecumseh Sherman; the mother of the British writer Anthony Trollope, who “took her revenge upon fair Porkopolis” (as the city was once known) in scathing prose, offering “a witty and brutal takedown of not only Americans’ reeking, offal-strewn streets, foul habits, and general uncouthness, but also…their hypocrisy about slavery”; the pioneering feminist Fanny Wright, who offended the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe “with her great masculine person, her loud voice, her untasteful attire”; and even the inspired man who invented the modern oven’s glass-windowed door. Along the way, Griffith writes entertainingly of the city’s early breweries, forgotten figures of national politics, local scandals and murders, and the like, concluding with the well-considered thought that when the time comes, “it might be nice to have a stone…for people to stroll past.” It’s a fine prose rejoinder to Spoon River Anthology and other similar works.

Lyrical reflections on death and remembrance.