Ward's use of the supernatural in Sing, Unburied, Sing

Is the voice of the ghost - Richie, the young man imprisoned alongside Jojo's grandfather (Pop, aka River Red, Riv, and Red) - necessary in Jesmyn Ward's novel Sing, Unburied, Sing? As readers of this blog will know, I generally prefer straightforward realistic or naturalistic narrative when I read fiction - narration that does not draw attention to itself or to its style but that is "transparent," that we can see right through as we observe the development of plot, character, mood, and setting, That said, how can one not like the great writing of Joyce, Faulkner, and many postmodernists (Hawkes, Coover, Gass) that draws attention to the writer and to the writing, and how can one not like stylistic innovators such as Woolf, or pure stylists such as Proust, Updike, Roth at times? So, yes, I think Ward could have written her novel without the voices of the ghosts (the unburied of the title, I assume) as there's enough rich material in the novel that it could stand on its own - a mixed-race family with serious drug-addiction problems - sets off to bring home the father/son/boyfriend from a northern Mississippi prison and faces various hardships and scary encounters along the way. Plus, Ward has a deft hand at fractured narrative; she tells the life story of several of the family members in counterpoint, easily shifting from one narrative to another, so that only as the novel progresses to we get a full view of the life story of the various characters: Pop's time in prison and how he survived, the murder that built animosity between the two families white and black yet brought the families together through the love of two characters - a bit R&J but without the tenderness and romance. Yes, she didn't need the ghostly voice of Richie - who appears only to young Jojo as a spirit that speaks to him, curled up in the foot space in the back seat of the car. But her writing is strong enough to carry the day - we feel that we're in the hands of a self-assured and trustworthy narrator and that the plot won't dissolve at the end in a puff of supernatural whimsy or narrative sleight (flying away on the back of an angel, waking from a dream) - a sad copout in many amateurish novels and stories. Ward's style draws heavily on the magic-realist tradition, but she is grounded solidly in American vernacular and in contemporary issues of racism, addiction, and rural poverty.