Planet Claire Suite for cello and sad-eyed lovers: a memoir

After 26 years of marriage, Porter's wife Claire suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage in their driveway. In elegiac prose, the bereft Porter grieves by reminiscing about the life they shared together. Directly addressed to his deceased wife, this memoir is a long final letter that will never be answered. We see how acutely he misses her presence while completing mundane daily tasks and perpetually revisits their shared experiences, from their earliest encounters to their travels and their lives as academics. He tries to make sense of events by considering lessons from literature, philosophy, music, and David Lynch. In Vonnegut-like passages, he imagines radioing a "space boy" about his grief as he careers through the cosmos. Porter uses the planets as a means to structure the chapters as well as to try to organize his momentous sense of loss that is ultimately without tangible meaning or reason. Porter's memoir is a wistful, often painful, but beautifully written account of the trauma of grief, and also embodies the way writing provides solace from the bleak absurdities of life.

An English professor employs his devotion to language to plumb the depths of unimaginable grief. Porter bravely recounts the circumstances surrounding the untimely death of his wife, Claire, a "meticulous scholar" herself. In excruciatingly moving detail, the author describes how, after 27 years of marriage, his wife collapsed on an otherwise normal Wednesday, the victim of an aneurysm. "Young and resilient, the needle on her life span hardly past midway, Claire died abruptly, as though I had been absentminded or had left the gas stove on or the door open," writes Porter. "I looked up from the morning paper and she was gone." Throughout, the author looks directly at grief, without avoidance or rationalization, chronicling the countless memorable aspects of his gut-wrenching experience, from the warmth of Claire's skin in the hospital to those who gratefully received his wife's organ donations. Porter is erudite and lyrical--characteristics about which Claire playfully teased him ("Claire was never fooled by eloquence. She was too keen to be tricked by a pretty sentence")--and he couches his thoughts in something of a memory palace and ruminations on celestial bodies. He also sends his most difficult thoughts out into the void in the form of "Space Boy," an imagined version of himself that is free to roam the cosmos looking for Claire. It's to the author's credit that none of these high-literary elements blunt or mitigate the trauma portrayed here, which is tough to digest, even on the page. Few readers will fail to be gripped by this tragically common story about death and what comes after for those left behind. "Obviously the dead don't need or want our grief," writes the author. "They're busy with other things, have a whole new set of rules. It's the living--we poor naked wretches--teeming clueless over this planet." A haunting and thought-provoking consideration of death and "how utterly it rips apart our lives." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.