The poetry of melancholy
Cements his reputation as a master of bittersweet comedy
‘Anapestic tetrameter.” Unless you move in rarefied and specialized circles, it’s a term unlikely to come up in bookclub gabfests and watercooler chats. A whole novel written in rhyming couplets of the meter in question would seem a particularly far-fetched proposition. The last rough equivalent that comes to mind is Vikram Seth’s largely forgotten The Golden Gate; otherwise, for many perfectly good readers, the last encounter with extended narrative poetry may well have been the Byron or Milton they were assigned in school. Well, that’s about to change, and David Rakoff ’s Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish is the agent.
Rakoff — Montreal-born, Toronto-raised and a New Yorker by choice and temperament — had established himself alongside David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and a small group of others as one of the eminent contemporary comic essayists before he died last year, at 47, of cancer. His final collection, 2010’s Half Empty, is especially indispensable, and bears a title summing up its author’s world view: he was one of the great curmudgeons, a self-described “life-affirming pessimist.” It was known that as he stared down his terminal diagnosis, he was at work on the final expression of that view, and now it’s here in the form of an interconnected set of portraits, each illustrating one of the verbs in the somewhat ungainly title.
The time frame Rakoff presents is sweeping, ranging from the early 20th century to the early 21st; the American lives portrayed are equally eclectic, from immigrant Irish slaughterhouse workers to a mid-life gay libertine in 1970s San Francisco. The passage featuring Helen, a 1950s Manhattan secretary coerced into an affair with a venal boss, shows Rakoff working in Mad Men territory, and is the perfect opportunity to show off something notable through the entire novel: his empathy with his female characters.
As for the form, it’s remarkable how quickly it comes to feel completely natural. You adjust your internal reading rhythms, and before you know it, you’re simply caught up in these narratives. Far from being distracted by the anapestic goings-on, you find yourself wondering why a lot more people don’t try it. (As with most poetry, reading it aloud is a good way to bring it alive; the planned audiobook edition, read by Rakoff, ought to be a treat.) Cherry-picking from as endlessly quotable a work as this one is almost too easy, but a good indication of the flavour of the whole can be given by the following, a passage describing a caregiver reading a magazine to a terminal patient:
“For what seemed like hours,” while always subjective
Was now so unknowable, flimsy, selective,
In thrall to the twists of his brain’s involutions
The cranial mists and synaptic occlusions
He’d had to contend with since he’d had his stroke,
Like trying to sculpt something solid from smoke
When Rakoff died last summer, I wrote in my Gazette tribute piece that his uniqueness lay in his fine balancing of the comic and the tragic. Even at his funni- timate ending. I will also say, though, that I’m now kind of looking forward, as a change of pace, to reading something not written by a writer in the final stages of a fatal illness.
L,D,M,D; C,P can’t be discussed without shining a spotlight on Seth’s portrait illustrations. As a cartoonist, the Ontario resident born Gregory Gallant has long been a visual poet of mid-20th-century melancholy and thwarted lives; even when his subjects have been contemporary, they’ve always seemed to be gazing back longingly to a time when all men wore suits and all women wore girdles. Given that Rakoff once said he identified far more strongly with the New York of Gershwin than with any subsequent era, he couldn’t have asked for a better-matched sensibility to enhance and complement his work. est, he was never more than a small step or two away from full-blown melancholy, something that made him every bit Sedaris’s equal even while probably ensuring he would never be quite as big a seller. In his farewell work, it has to be said, the ratio comes out decidedly in favour of sadness. But such is the sheer zest for life on display, however bittersweet its expression, that the ultimate effect is uplifting.
By complete chance, I read this book back-to-back with Iain Banks’s valedictory novel The Quarry. In tandem, it was a rare and bracing experience watching two writers so different from each other attempting to get to grips — unconsciously, in Banks’s case — with the ul-
Cherry-picking from as endlessly quotable a work as this one is almost too easy.