Review by New York Times Review
THERE'S an absolutely essential video available on YouTube, of a 2012 segment from NPR's "This American Life," in which the writer and frequent guest David Rakoff walks onstage with his left hand tucked into his pocket. Rakoff has recently undergone surgery, his "fourth in as many years" for cancer, he explains, and now possesses a "flail limb." Aside from "being able to shrug talmudically," he says, "I can neither move nor feel my left arm." He describes relearning basic chores, including brushing his teeth and grating cheese, then says he once believed that "if I just buckled down to the great work at hand ... my best self was just there, right around the corner." Now, he insists, "I'm done with all that. I'm done with so many things, like dancing." Rakoff danced a lot as a child, "like a straight boy obsessed with baseball, except ... better." He took more serious dance training in college and then in Manhattan, where the classes became "an exercise in humiliation." He concludes that this was all "a version of myself that's long since ceased to exist." Then he moves away from the lectern and - to a recording of the aching Irving Berlin ballad "What'll I Do?" - he begins to dance. He dances intently, with a precise grace. He's a superb showman, and he knows that the moment is both gorgeous and heartbreaking. Rakoff died three months later, at 47. I've watched this video countless times, and I always think, with regard to life and death and dancing: That's how it's done. I knew David just a bit, and I happily blurbed the first of his three collections of morally fervid, gleefully caustic essays. (To quote one example, about his early attempt at a publishing career: After a particularly troublesome author lapses into unconsciousness following cosmetic surgery, Rakoff e-mails a friend, "Do you think her being in a coma will affect the quality of her writing?" To quote another, about the Hodgkin's disease that first surfaced in his 20s: "Even though laughter may well be 'the best medicine,' it is not, in point of fact, actual medicine.") Yet by all rights I should hate Rakoff's newly published novel, "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish" - and not just because it's so awful to contemplate a world without any more David Rakoff books, or any more David Rakoff. No, I should hate this book because it's written entirely in verse, and I am a committed poetryphobe. I am a crass and ignorant person who considers all poetry, from Shakespeare on down, to be a complete hoax. Like a bore at a cocktail party, most poems discuss only the weather, their feelings and that little gray bird they saw on their way to work. As with yogurt and math, I'm convinced that anyone who claims to enjoy poetry is lying. But here's the miracle of "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish" (which I will henceforth, and justifiably, refer to as "Love"): It's an extraordinary and deliriously entertaining work. It didn't make me love poetry, but it certainly affirmed my love for David Rakoff. The book is a heartfelt, charmingly profound American epic. At a breezy 113 pages, it charts pretty much the entire 20th century, through a series of interlocking lives. Early on, we meet Margaret, a redheaded, brutally poor preteen who leaves school to work in a Chicago slaughterhouse. When the male employees jeer at her, she retreats, in her thoughts, "To a place close yet distant, both here and not here; / Present, but untouched by doubt or by fear." Margaret has a vicious stepfather: "Frank said that one time, in Wichita, Kansas, / He'd killed a man who had addressed him as Francis." What follows is vivid and ugly, but the scope of the storytelling remains fresh and optimistic. The book leaps to Burbank, Calif., where a family barely gets by in the wake of the Depression: "The yard a brown painting of motionless calm / The packed, ochre dirt and the lone, scraggly palm." There we meet Clifford, a boy who lives to draw: "Above all, the thing that had captured his heart, / And opened his world: reproductions of art." Clifford is also inspired by radio broadcasts of a show called "Rex Bond, Inveterate Explorer," and he develops a crush, imagining "He'd find Rex bound up in some old, empty warehouse / And carry him home (in the dream it was their house.)" His sexual awakening occurs as he faints, after he's asked to sketch a nude male model; he experiences "A vaguely elating but frightening bubble, / He felt buoyant and free and yet somehow in trouble." Clifford develops a touching and tumultuous relationship with his shy, awkward cousin, Helen, and the narrative shoots forward another decade or two, as the adult Helen works as a secretary in Manhattan. She suffers the indignities of an affair and office gossip, until, at a Christmas party, "Helen just stands there, observing it all, / Sipping her gimlet against the far wall." Rakoff is adept at portraying the challenges and loneliness of his female characters, along with the swagger and arrogance of their husbands and bosses. We revisit Clifford, now grown and living in a beloved San Francisco, where he draws underground comics. When his work is attacked by conservatives for its gay subject matter, Clifford responds: "I know it won't sway you the smallest scintilla / To point out the sex is quite firmly vanilla." Time hurtles forward, to the 1970s and '80s, where a love triangle blossoms, centering on Susan, a spoiled, Lacroix-clad denizen of the art world, who attends openings where "the waiters were done up like Jean Genet felons." Susan is pursued by the best friends Josh and Nathan, and a wedding occurs at Posner's, a Long Island catering hall with "Venetian palazzo floors pounded by horas / Cut-velvet drapes framing chopped-liver Torahs." As lives are ruined, or at least deformed, through deceit and ambition, other calamities erupt, including the scourge of AIDS. As some characters sicken, others remain aloft, astride their high-powered fortunes, in homes with "Framed scenes of hunts on a hunter-green wall / A pillow: 'Nouveau riche beats no riche at all.'" Rakoff artfully depicts shifting social impulses, as Susan changes her name to Sloan and then Shulamit. As the century draws to a close, characters practice all the verbs in the book's title. Ultimately, some wonderfully surprising connections between the most disparate people are revealed. The book ends with an especially lovely revelation that's both ruefully comic and crushingly sad. For such a short work, "Love" feels full-scale and satisfying; what might have been a platter of tempting but trivial literary hors d'oeuvres becomes a feast. As for the verse, which is mostly expressed through rhyming couplets? Rakoff's style is at times reminiscent of the quicksilver Algonquin dazzle of Dorothy Parker or Ogden Nash, along with the greater emotional reach of Frank O'Hara (whom Rakoff name-checks). These are my kind of poets, accessible and unpretentious. The verse also formalizes the novel's events, lending them a Homeric aspect - if only Homer had been chattier and had described a hippie-ish fellow as "Clad in the uniform he'd worn since Ohio: / Birkenstocks, drawstring pants (think Putumayo)." The reader can feel Rakoff's delight in diagramming a tricky or shamelessly rude rhyme. "Love" is a Wallenda-like feat ; I held my breath, waiting to see if Rakoff could hold steady and make his way to safety, which he does in giddy, wistful triumph. Rakoff was born in Canada, and in his collection "Fraud" he describes his attempt at securing an American green card. Because of his writing skills, Rakoff was declared an "extraordinary alien." He was a wonder, and "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish" is a gift. A vaguely elating but frightening bubble, / He felt buoyant and free and yet somehow in trouble.' "I can neither move nor feel my left arm": David Rakoff in "This American Life: The Invisible Made Visible." Paul Rudnick's latest book, "Gorgeous," was published in May.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Rakoff, the best-selling author of Half Empty (2010), brings his thoughtful and tender perspective on life to this wonderfully funny yet heartbreakingly sad novel-in-verse. Throughout this rhyming novel, he crosses decades, telling the great American story through memorable characters loosely linked by acts of kindness or callousness. For example, a young runaway unfairly banished from her home finds unlikely comfort with a vagabond. Each chapter serves up a slice of life's victories, discoveries, cruelties, and casualties, such as when a young man discovers sexual freedom in 1960s San Francisco only to later tend to friends ravaged by AIDS. This novel begs to be read aloud in the mode of Rakoff's frequent and popular radio appearances on NPR's This American Life. Although, sadly, we won't be hearing new works from Rakoff, who died in August 2012, fans of the award-winning author will embrace with particular appreciation this final lesson on how to accept life's blessings and blows.--Suhy, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this novel, written in verse, each brief chapter introduces a different character, living in a different era, sometimes in a different city. The effect is mesmerizing, as both the cadence of the couplets and the connections that link the characters become more established and familiar. Rakoff (Half-Empty), a frequent This American Life contributor and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, who died in the summer of 2012, combines his wit and his gravity for an unexpected blend of uncomfortable rhymes that build into recognizable stories. In one of the most intriguing chapters, Helen is a secretary seduced by her boss and then transferred once she needs an abortion: "She asked if he'd ever again say Hello,/ Fedora'd and coated and ready to go/ He took a step backward as if sensing danger/ And fixed her with eyes of a cold-blooded stranger." Astounding, too, is how effectively an entire century is captured in these slices of daily life-how each era both defines and inspires those within its grasp. Agent: Irene Skolnick, Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This short novel of rhyming verse might be better read aloud, if only the author were still alive to read it. The late essayist for NPR's This American Life, Rakoff (Half Empty, 2010, etc.) was accustomed to writing for the ear, but never has his writing seemed more designed to be heard than here. The posthumous publication provides a fitting memorial to a humorist whose embrace of life encompassed its dark side and who died of cancer in 2012 at age 47. Written in anapestic tetrameter--most familiar from " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" and most commonly associated with light comedy--this novel of interlocking stories nevertheless deals with rape, abortion, adultery, homophobia, AIDS, dementia and death. It's like a child's bedtime story that you would never read to children, yet it retains a spirit of sweetness and light, even as mortality and inhumanity provide a subtext to the singsong. "If it weren't so tragic, it could have been farce," he writes of an early blooming 12-year-old girl who attracts plenty of unwanted attention, including that of her brutish stepfather, and then finds herself blamed before escaping to something of a happy ending. The bittersweet center of the novel is a young boy who discovers both his artistic talent and his homosexuality, lives a life that is both rich and short, and dies just a little younger than the author did. Some of the rhymes read like doggerel ("crime it...climate," "Naugahyde...raw inside") and some of the laughs seem a little forced, but the author brings a light touch to deadly serious material, finding at least a glimmer of redemption for most of his characters. Strong work. It deepens the impact that this was the last book completed by the author.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
