The Businessman features well-developed characters. Most of them are ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary interaction of the spirit world and Earth.

Bob Glandier is a venal businessman with ordinary tastes and petty emotions; his evil is banality. Giselle, the wife Glandier murdered, is a spirit who had been predestined by God to be a saint. Her murder ties her spirit into the nightmarish dreams of her husband. Giselle's mother, Joy-Ann Anker, dies of cancer and finds herself under the care of the spirit of a nineteenth-century actress and poetaster, Adah Menken. A courageous and strong person, Joy-Ann struggles to free her daughter from Bob Glandier's ugly dreams, and in so doing she also gains entry to heaven for several poet-suicides, including Berryman and Sylvia Plath.

The mixture of fantasy and reality in The Businessman is sometimes startling.

The character of John Berryman, who was a real-life...