At death’s door
The Obituary Writer of Ann Hood’s title is Vivien Lowe, who offers clients with imagination an extraordinary gift. The occasional bereaved person might turn away in disappointment because this writer cares little about date of birth, age, occupation or even manner of death — basics deemed important by conventional chroniclers of lost lives. She works from the theory that mere “facts — degrees and numbers and jobs and affiliations — were not what made a life,” and she’s right.
She gets to the essence, digging like any good reporter to unearth the unique qualities of each person and bringing joy to survivors. She has a loyal, one might say “cult,” following when Hood introduces her in California in 1919 as one of two main characters living for the most part in different eras, but forming the backbone of The Obituary Writer.
Miss Lowe lives and writes in Napa, helping others and seeking solace for her own grief from the presumed loss of her lover, David Gardner, in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The search for David is her other touchstone.
She asks potential clients to describe the deceased and writes, for example, that Frank raised songbirds and could imitate every chirp and call. This man paid attention to the glorious minutiae of nature. Sometimes his wife thought he cared more for his birds than for her, but then she would soften as she talked to Miss Lowe about his gentleness in nursing her through consumption. She always chooses a few lines of poetry, in Frank’s case from William Blake’s “The Birds.” “Dost thou truly long for me? And am I thus sweet to thee?” Miss Lowe comforts a husband drowning in grief over the death of his wife, Gyöngyi (Pearl), an immigrant from Austria-Hungary who sold her pastries in the street. She describes “the flakiness of her crusts, the smoothness of her creams, how she perfectly balanced fruit and nuts and sugar in her strudels.” For her, she picks Keats: “Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl.”
Before we meet Miss Lowe, Hood introduces us to the other protagonist, Claire, married to Peter, with a young daughter Kathy, and living in1960 in the Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Men leave green and leafy neighbourhoods to work in the U.S. capital, while wives stay at home spraying cheese on Ritz crackers. When Claire tells her husband she really believes in John F. Kennedy, he replies he thought she only volunteered for political campaigns out of boredom. It’s the era of Mad Men where women listen to heady (if hyped) accounts of office politicking from their husband and gossip — the calm before the coming storm of change.
Hood’s first sentence is intoxicating: “If Claire had to look back and decide why she had the affair in the first place, she would point to the missing boy.” We know immediately that loss plays a significant role in Claire’s life, as it does in Miss Lowe’s. So do love and forbidden love and, of course, the connection between these two women. Hood tells a subtle story with tantalizing surprises.
A prize-winning author, she writes literary fiction, rare enough these days. It’s a slim, sparely told book, with action verbs and adherence to the motto, “show, don’t tell” — a talent fading faster among writers than polar bears on ice floes. Hood offers clues to the mysteries of the human heart, an area where I at least need all the help I can get.