Death books get big bounce

Theodore Roosevelt's diary entry for Feb. 14, 1884, was as stark as a stab wound: He drew a big black "X" on the page.

He had ample reason to be distressed, of course: His wife and mother had died on the same day. And while he'd cheer up in the years ahead-he remarried, hunted large animals, became the nation's youngest president at age 43 - those who knew him best always believed he was haunted by loss.

Death isn't pretty. It isn't pretty to witness, to brood over, and it's probably rather unpleasant to experience, too.

So it's no wonder that contemporary civilization puts its own big black "X" on the page when it comes to death. We don't much like it - who would, except coffinmakers? - and we tend to change the subject when it comes up.

Why, then, have books about death suddenly become critical and popular successes? Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Knopf, 240 pages, $23.95), her account of her husband's sudden death from a heart attack, won the 2005 National Book Award and has found a home in the upper reaches of The New York Times best-seller list; John Banville's "The Sea," a novel about a man's grief over his wife's death, won England's Man Booker Prize in 2005 - the equivalent of America's Pulitzer Prize. Last month, Sandra M. Gilbert's book "Death's Door: Modern Dying and Ways We Grieve" (Norton) was published.

Clearly, something odd is going on: While death remains a closed-door subject for most of us, we're also displaying an intense interest by making books about it surprise best sellers and major award-winners.

"It's very striking," Gilbert said of the current paradox whereby the topic of death is both hidden and hot. "In a society where there's such an imperative to keep quiet about grief, there's still an urgent need to testify. Writers want to say to people: `This pain, this suffering, this grief is part of life. You won't let me mourn - so I'm going to testify to my own private pain.'

"Culturally, there's a denial of death," added Gilbert, a prominent literary critic and emeritus English professor at the University of California at Davis.

And yet here we are, with death books dotting people's nightstands. What gives?

It could be, Gilbert speculated, that our reluctance to deal with death - it's not exactly an ice-breaker at cocktail parties - has forced it to find another way forward, showing up in our literature as opposed to our lunch conversations. We possess a great hunger to confront the reality and inevitability of death - "Sooner or later, all of us will lose somebody," Gilbert said - and that hunger must be sated somewhere.

Also contributing to the urgency of our current need to contemplate death, she adds, might be the Bush administration's policy of forbidding photographs of the returning flag-draped coffins of American service personnel killed in the Iraq war. This, she believes, creates a strange, surreal fog around the conflict. "We act as if it isn't happening," Gilbert said. "It's a terribly serious business and when it's pushed underground, it becomes a sickness."

Along comes a book such as Didion's, which hauls death and grief into the public sphere. It constitutes a way of "speaking the unspeakable," Gilbert said. Ultimately, we all will have to think about death; when a sharp, talented writer such as Didion thinks about it out loud, we gather to listen.

Unlike Didion, Banville didn't write from a personal experience of grief.

"I don't know where this (theme of) grief came from," he said from his home in Ireland. "I'll be 60 later this year. Perhaps I'm beginning to face the reality of things."

He readily agreed, though, that the issue of death is permeating the culture just now and that such a preoccupation necessarily informs his work. "Every writer, every artist, every human being is affected by the time in which he or she lives."

The books by Banville and Didion are quite different. Didion writes with dry, austere formality; her elegantly turned sentences rise like a primly clipped hedge between writer and reader: "Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life." Yet the overall effect of her chronicle of a husband's death and a child's serious illness - her adult daughter died after the book was published - is one of excruciating sadness. The hedge withers, and we're all making eye contact.

Banville's book, conversely, which is narrated by a cold and haughty man outraged at his wife for abandoning him, is much denser, sometimes brutally funny and always piercingly honest about grief's essential selfishness: "Anna coughed, making a sound like the clatter of bones. I knew this was the end. I felt inadequate to the moment, and wanted to cry out for help. Nurse, nurse, come quick, my wife is leaving me!"

Both books, however, are laced with an underlying melancholy.

The literature of grief is vast and various, from anguished memoirs such as C.S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed" (1961) to lugubrious chants such as John Milton's "Lycidas" (1637), but in the end, death is a subject that all of us will eventually know everything about.

"The Sea" is the 14th novel by the notoriously obscure Banville; his previous works have earned critical adjectives such as "difficult" and "challenging." Not this one, however: By picking grief as his theme, Banville, acknowledged, he appears to have struck a universally accessible chord.

"I was amazed by how people were touched by the book. I've never had that level of direct response," he said. "I realized I'd really done something."

Gilbert, whose husband died unexpectedly a decade ago, said, "Loss is what it means to be mortal. This is a really profound truth that we have to come to terms with - in a culture where people really don't have ways to proceed."

So we turn to books, and books, in turn, give us a way of getting acquainted with grief - in advance of the real thing that surely awaits us all.

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A READING LIST FOR GRIEF 101

These days I must take the work in small and easily measured doses, it's a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again.

-John Banville, "The Sea" (2005)

My grief, I find, is not desolation or rebellion at universal law or deity. I find grief to be much simpler and sadder. Contemplating the Eternal Deity and His Universal Laws leaves me grave but dry-eyed. But a sunny fast wind along the Sound, good sailing weather, a new light boat, will shake me to tears: how Johnny would have loved this boat, this wind, this sunny day!

-John Gunther, "Death Be Not Proud" (1949)

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the trust accounts.

-Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005)

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job - where the machine seems to run on much as usual - I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth?

-C.S. Lewis, "A Grief Observed" (1961)

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.