Years ago, I taught a college course on how to live well in light of our mortality. We read great books: Sophocles’ Antigone, Seneca’s On the Brevity of Life, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet at semester’s end, I’m not sure the course succeeded in its biggest aim. It’s a tall order to get college students to think—to really think—about the inevitability of our death, and how to live each day knowing it might be our last.
Bestselling author John Kenney’s new novel, I See You’ve Called in Dead, takes up this tall order for us all. It’s a witty, poignant novel, full of laugh-out-loud moments in various shades of situational and dark comedy. As with great comedy, it also makes us think. At one point, protagonist Bud Stanley quotes a Sanskrit text in which the greatest wonder in the world is “that every day, all around us, people die, but we act as if it couldn’t happen to us.”
Bud is a middle-aged, New York City obituary writer whose life unravels. He bears unresolved childhood trauma. He and his wife want to start a family but suffer a miscarriage. His wife dumps him for another man who’s better looking and more promising. Meanwhile, his career has stalled out. Unhappy at heart, unhappy at home, unhappy at work, unhappy with everything and everyone, most of all himself, Bud does a colossally idiotic thing. He writes a fantastical obituary for himself, uploads it to his newspaper’s server, and sends it irretrievably to the whole world via wire.
Suspended from work, Bud comes to himself by taking stock of the tender fragility, absurd contradictions, and deep meaning of human life. Friends help him: his paraplegic landlord Tim, the precocious boy Leo who lives down the street, his boss Howard and co-worker Tuan, Clara, who he meets at his ex-mother-in-law’s funeral. Their friendships—measured in presence, patience, honesty, and love—give Bud a new opportunity at real life. So does attending the wakes and funerals of strangers, where he gets an education in wisdom.
I can’t emphasize enough how funny the book is. Among his accolades, John Kenney has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The man knows how to make you laugh. But he also invites self-reflection. Bud’s best friend Tim muses, “Maybe we’re all obituary writers. And our job is to write the best story we can now” (107). Among Bud’s last words in the book are these: “I don’t understand death. . . . I think to fully get it, you have to feel it so profoundly that it upsets your sense of the world. It has to make you a little crazy. But it also has to make you love this miracle of existence to the point of bursting. If it doesn’t, well, then you don’t get it yet” (288).
I See You’ve Called in Dead will make you laugh, make you cry, and just possibly might make you live.
