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No more magic realism
A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies.
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the undertaking:
life studies
BY THOMAS LYNCH
BY DAVID FUTRELLE the always-something- less-than-fully respectable profession of undertaking has never quite recovered from the sucker punch delivered to it in 1963 by Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death," a caustic attack on what Mitford (echoing an 18th century writer) called the Dismal Trade. Mitford, a sharp and witty polemicist, presented a picture of a profession overrun by sanctimonious con men and carpetbaggers, insidiously exploiting the bereaved at the moment of their greatest weakness. Thomas Lynch's "The Undertaking" isn't designed explicitly as a rebuttal of Mitford, but in many ways that's just what it is -- and an effective one at that. Lynch, an undertaker and a poet, suggests in the quietly persuasive essays that make up this collection that our fear and mistrust of undertakers is less a rational response to a creepy profession than the result of our own messy and conflicted feelings about death itself. Funerals aren't conducted for the sake of the dead (who, after all, aren't there to appreciate them); they are "something done for the living ... something done by the living." The desire many people have for a quick and painless funeral, as Lynch suggests of those who tell relatives to "just throw me in a box and throw me in a hole," is in reality a desperate, and ultimately futile, attempt to deny the problem of death itself. But no matter how carefully the undertaker cleans up the dead, the emotions they inspire don't allow for such an easy resolution. Critics of the Dismal Trade say that decisions about funeral arrangements should be made beforehand, so as not to be clouded by feelings of grief and rage and the other emotions that death brings to the surface. Lynch asks why. "There's this hopeful fantasy that by prearranging the funeral, one might be able to pre-feel the feelings. You now get a jump on the anger and the fear and the helplessness," he writes. "It's as modern as planned parenthood and prenuptial agreements and as useless, however tidy it may be about the finances, when it comes to the feelings involved." Not all of the essays in this lucid and engaging collection deal directly with Lynch's chosen trade. His subjects range widely: In one essay, he tells the story of a friend who wooed and won a woman with the help of a poem about artichoke hearts; in another he details the fervid hypochondria of a fellow poet.
But in the end Lynch's thoughts always come back to the brute fact of our own mortality -- and of our complicated and sometimes self-defeating attempts to come to terms with this fact. Lynch avoids the somber sanctimony that too often afflicts writing about matters of life and death. He writes with a dark and some might say morbid humor -- speculating on what it would take to build a combination golf course/graveyard he calls the Golfatorium, or describing his Uncle Eddie's unsuccessful attempts to build a suicide cleanup empire ("Whaddya think about 1-800-SUICIDE? Too morbid?"). Not all of what Lynch writes is ultimately persuasive. I still feel there is something almost supernaturally creepy about the attempts to tart up fresh corpses for open-casket funerals. But he has written a brave and eloquent -- and even entertaining -- book on one of the most unsettling of subjects. He is, as they might say at Wired, a true out-of-the-box thinker.
David Futrelle is a regular contributor to Salon. |
