scmrak's Full Review: Marion Winik - The Glen Rock Book of the Dead
The Glen Rock Book of the Dead by Marion Winik
"Fantasy" means more that swords, sorcery, and scantily-clad nymphs. Fantasy is all the things we hope can come true even though we doubt they ever will - and we all have them. For the first few years I lived in Austin, Texas, my literary fantasy was that I'd be shopping at Sun Harvest or Book People and hear a signature throaty growl behind me. Some Austinites fantasized about meeting Lance or Willie (done that) - instead, I dreamt of turning around and saying "Hello" to Marion. Alas, Marion Winik left Austin; as did I not long after. In subsequent years, the frequency of her commentary on NPR's All Things Considered dwindled and I heard her voice, all redolent of whiskey and cigarettes, no more. Widowed in 1994 (the story she spins out in First Comes Love), Winik had remarried and moved with her new husband to small-town Pennsylvania, where she started a different phase in life. But she kept on writing, thank the Lord, as she proved with a 2005 collection of essays she titled Above Us Only Sky (from John Lennon's "Imagine"). After a three-year hiatus, Winik returned, this time with a vehicle that's a bit spiritual, a bit weird, a bit funny - and a whole lot interesting.
In her latest, a tiny volume that might well be described as Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology told by a female Jack Kerouac, Winik shares fifty-one vignettes of people (mostly) she's known; people who have since "moved on." They're dead - hence the title, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, a title that cross-breeds the Tibetan Book of the Dead with Winick's post office in Pennsylvania. As deaths leave the survivors feeling the full spectrum of emotions, Winik manages to capture her own full range of experiences in these few pages. No matter whether she's writing about her cat, her father, or her son's second-grade teacher, she manages to capture not just the essence of the dearly departed but the fundamentals of her understanding of the person and his life as well. Some deaths left her sad, a few left her puzzled - and at least one, a biography caustic and dripping sarcasm, left her angry that she could no longer argue with the deceased. None is more than a couple hundred words long: life - and death - held to the light in a handful of words.
Most of the fifty-one subjects are identified not by name, but by some characteristic that defined their relationship. Winik's first husband, Tony, is The Skater; her father, The Driving Instructor. Many of the characters who've passed through Winik's famously tumultuous life will be familiar to those who've read her memoir or her collections of essays, like The Skater and his friends, all dead of AIDS; and The Clown, dead by his own hand. An unsurprising number of Winik's friends from her twenties and thirties (and perhaps forties) died of overdoses (though one was hit by a bird while riding a motorcycle in Mexico). The Glen Rock Book of the Dead isn't entirely dark and dreary, however: Marion shares many a pleasant memory - there's a paean to the insouciant King of The Condo, an Austin alley cat named Rocco; and then there's an epitaph for the little pink house at Catina and Moulton in New Orleans, casually killed by that bi-yotch, Katrina.
Perhaps most poignant is her vignette of The Competition, a fellow memoirist with whom she shared an alma mater and a messy life - except that she'd never met her, wouldn't know her from Eve:
When I heard the eulogy on NPR, saw the obituary in The Times, I was blindsided. Lung cancer, 42, are you kidding me? Now she was in my mind even more of the time, When I fell in love with a miniature dachshund a couple of years later, I finally read her chronicle of interspecies passion, but all I could do about it now was hug my dog. That summer I was back in Providence where we'd both gone to school. It was June and the students were moving out, their belongings in piles on the sidewalk. There among the stereo speakers and economics texts, I found a miniature Blues Clues armchair for my daughter, and on the ground beside it, a paperback copy of Drinking: a Love Story. I snatched it up and hugged it as if it were written by my sister. The one I never met. [Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: a Love Story and Pack of Two, died in 2002]
You might think the subject odd; you might be find the numerous references to homosexuality and drug use off-putting. You might just think, who cares about the optometrist who died when she was eleven? So what if her first father-in-law was a Quiet Man? Why should we care about the deaths of her second husband's three brothers? We won't go all John Donne on each other here - let's just acknowledge that Marion Winik has the skill, the words, the heart to make us care about these people... people we've never met.
(originally published in a slightly different form at thisweeksbook.blogspot.com )
In her author s note, Marion Winik writes that in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, people build altars to their loved ones . . . they go to the cemetery...More at Buy.com
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