Being Dead by Jim Crace

I certainly did not expect the title of this book to be so literal in describing the contents, but, sure enough, that's just what it's about: being dead. The book begins with the random murder of a married couple of middle-aged scientists among coastal sand dunes and ends with this sentence: "These are the everending days of being dead."

In between, the author performs some clever gymnastics with time, moving in a forward direction to trace the couple's last day from awakening until the murder, traveling in a backward direction over 30 years to the time when the couple first met and made love in the dunes, and moving forward again through the daughter's search for her missing parents. However, Crace spends the most time with the dead couple, picturing in graphic and extensive detail the actions of nature and decay on the dead bodies.

Crace is a master literary stylist, if you appreciate that style. I'm talking about the self-consciously poetic style of MFA creative writing schools, which lauds such descriptions as "...the wine-deep, sad, narcotic sea." It's no surprise to find that he has taught at both the Iowa Writers Workshop and at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers.

The front cover of my copy of the novel features a quote from a review in the Los Angeles Times which asserts that it is "an exquisitely gentle and unsentimental tale on the evolution of love." I surely missed that part. I read a bit about lust, a bit about resentment, but mostly I was banged over the head with the heavy message that dead is dead, with nothing after. I can appreciate the fact that many have this view, but I hardly see it as the entire premise of a novel. I certainly cannot understand how anyone could have viewed the book in any other light, especially since the introductory epigram quotes a poem which begins:

"Don't count on Heaven, or on Hell.
You're dead. That's it. Adieu. Farewell.
Eternity awaits? Oh, sure!
It's Putrefaction and Manure
And unrelenting Rot, Rot, Rot,"

By the way, the supposed author of the poem, Sherwin Stephens, is not actually a real person; thus the poem is Crace's.

I suppose many would appreciate this novel (after all, it won the National Critics Circle Award for 1999 and was a New York Times Editor's Choice of the Year), but I would not recommend it to the people I know.

And to all I would offer this advice: DO NOT READ CHAPTER 6 WHILE EATING BREAKFAST.