LIFE BEFORE DEATH
By Abby Frucht
Scribner, 240 pages, $22
When, in a novel’s very first sentence, its narrator finds a lump in her breast, the reader might become skeptical. Breast cancer as a social tragedy has become so politicized–weighed down by so much outrage and hyperbole, totemized by so many ribbons on so many lapels–that it is hard to imagine any fresh, let alone startling approach to it as an individual experience. Yet startling and fresh this novel certainly is–and beautiful, and moving, and exquisitely strange.
“Life Before Death” is Abby Frucht’s fifth work of fiction, and like her first novel–“Are You Mine?”–it bushwhacks, in hilarious detail, through private female terrain. Surprisingly, perhaps, this is not a novel about a woman’s all-out war against a harrowing disease or her discovery of survivalist sisterhood. It is a story about dying before one has reason to give death much thought; about dying under the auspices of a grandiose, witty and loving imagination.
Isobel Albright is “an insufferable optimist” who describes herself as “utterly forty, so contentedly middle-aged I could have sat up and mooed about it.” A curator at a Midwestern local-history museum, she is a proudly solitary romantic who would rather end one promising relationship after another than risk disillusionment and loss of control. An only child whose parents were recently killed when a small plane crashed into their house, Isobel has just two close relationships: Martha, her apparent alter ego, an earthy, impulsive woman who 19 years ago and by way of a tender but exceptionally bizarre liaison became a single mother; and Hercules, Martha’s son, who is working as Isobel’s
intern and living temporarily in her apartment.
Isobel’s mixed feelings about choosing to forgo marriage and children coalesce into a complex love for Hercules. In many of the novel’s loveliest passages, she fixates on the virginal young man she thinks of as a godson yet describes like a lover: “He’d been staying here only a couple of weeks, yet already his bath time produced a familiar array of sounds; the rasp of the rings across the metal rod, the way he wrung out his washcloth before rolling it up, the snapping shut of the lid of his soap box, the quiet huff of his towel as he pulled it from its resting place on top of the hamper, the clicking on of the exhaust which he always saved for last, enjoying the leftover steam. When he was gone, there would be no trace of him, nothing but the vapor of a vapor of a vapor scented with Ivory soap.”
Just as she did in “Are You Mine?” when she wrote about modern childbirth, Frucht gives an astutely absurdist view of the cancer patient’s experience. As she is prepped for surgery, Isobel observes how “the phone affixed to the wall above the hospital bed hung over me in an irksome way as if at any moment my mother might call from some Heavenly pay phone after all these sad years of her poised, dead silence, and I would have to tell her I couldn’t talk right now, I was having my breast shaved.”
If this story were merely the sum of such wry, lyrical observations, it would still be impressive, but Frucht’s talent for folding together the tender and the slapstick, fueled by the intoxicating glee of her prose, takes “Life Before Death” in baroque directions. Who else could make us believe that within days of Isobel’s discovery of her tumor, the museum where she works burns almost to the ground; that days later she awakens from a biopsy to find herself recovering from a double mastectomy? Nor do we balk at the two oddball characters who barge into Isobel’s newly catastrophic life: Jack Klink, the Cambodian-American surgeon who so blithely takes off her breasts, and a nameless community volunteer who helps retrieve artifacts from the museum rubble. The most striking Grim Reaper you may ever meet, the Crazy Volunteer appears whenever she feels compelled to hand Isobel (with a prosthetic hand) an object she wants Isobel to keep. Each of these objects–including an antique telephone (which rings in the trunk of Isobel’s car), a fur trapper’s glove and the wedding ring of a World War II widow–transports her into a different chapter of an alternative existence. There, the brute cure of chemotherapy tempers the frugal Isobel into Bald Queen Butterfly, who shaves her head and drapes it, Cleopatra-style, with flamboyant jewelry. Over decades to come, this phoenix-like Isobel becomes a mother and then a wife.
Perhaps because this other life is not clearly based in daydream or delirium, “Life Before Death” is bound to be labeled surreal. But to see any of what “happens” in Isobel’s story as supernatural belittles its essential supposition that the mind, with its magnificent powers of embroidery, sometimes holds its own against the terrifying physical momentum of death.
At once deeply sad and remarkably joyful, this book depicts the conclusion of a life lived simply yet embellished with spirit: life not just before death but despite, and wholeheartedly embracing, it.
