Book Review: The Brief History of the Dead, or I Want a Recount

When you’re operating on a 4:30 a.m. wake up call via Baby, your eyes tend to grow heavy with the smallest amount of radiation and one’s attention span is about as focused as a broken pair of binoculars. I write whatever I can spew out, you get to read it, and nobody is happy.

Isn’t that how blogs work?

There’s nothing like an open-ended, ambivalent ending to a novel to ruin your day. Take, for instance, the conclusion of Kevin Brockmeier’s "The Brief History of the Dead," which was chosen in this space, American Idol-style, as my next reading choice. (As promised, here’s the review).

It’s one of the more frustrating reads I’ve had in quite some time — a book with a dynamite first chapter (featured in The New Yorker) and brilliant premise that gradually loses its momentum until it wheezes, keels over, and dies. The book just kinda ends with no resolution and no greater understanding of the characters, the world at large, or just why you would even bother. "The Brief History" should have been the unabridged version.

Brockmeier writes extraordinarily well, and that’s part of his problem. He describes the undulations in snowbanks. He rhapsodizes on the curvature of spines. He waxes poetic on the feel of a fork in a woman’s hand. (For those of us weaned on fiction workshop-speak, it’s called "falling in love with your writing.") This kind of stuff is best consumed in small servings, lest the narrative grind to a halt — which, for a novel like this one, just can’t happen.

That’s because if you put a clever conceit at the center of the story, you really have to go all the way with it, and if that doesn’t mean a clear resolution like in a murder mystery, at least don’t leave so many unanswered questions that the reader is genuinelly puzzled rather than enlightened, or is motivated to throw the volume across the living room, where it inevitably will strike an expensive piece of porcelain passed down 10 generations of your wife’s family.

Which is a shame, because "The Brief History of the Dead" starts wondrously. The novel begins in the city of the dead, where those who have left this mortal coil "live" in existences that are similar to the living — they have jobs, they go out to eat, ride bicycles and have affairs, though they age not. The catch: you can only stay in the city of the dead if there are those alive who remember you. Once they pass, you have to leave as well. To where, we do not know.

This state of affairs is threatened by a virus (which has something to do with Coca-Cola. Really.) that is rapidly ridding the earth of human beings and thus emptying out the city of the dead. A research scientist on assignment in Antarctica, Laura Byrd, has not been infected, but as her collegues around her die, she is eventually left alone, the last remaining living human on the planet. 

Brockmeier: Coulda, woulda, shoulda

The book presents these two worlds side-by-side, switching chapters between the City of the Dead, where we are given the perspective of different individuals, and Antarctica, where Laura muses mightily on her life and memories. It’s probably the right gambit, though you wish that Brockmeier had done a little more parallel editing — if not to show a cause-and-effect, at least to give the story the gitty up it sorely lacks.

I don’t know what to make of Brockmeier or his career; I also read several of his short stories and had the same experience: great premise, teriffic writing, three-dimentional characters, and no ending. Maybe that’s just his style, to purposely irritate the crap out of me. I’m not looking for Joycean brilliance here, or some tie-it-all-together-with-all-the-suspects-in-a-room, but an idea, however small, to bookend the brilliance of the first chapter.

To mix sports metaphors, this should have been a contender, but died in the stretch run.

So, those of you who voted on this book, you’re fired. Ironically enough, I’m going to read "Then We Came to the End" next, which, hopefully, will live up to its title.