The Undertaking: Life Studies From The Dismal Trade (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
Books make their way to my shelf for a variety of reasons: they've been a bestseller, they've been recommended by friends, the author had an interesting profile written about them, or the book just seems like something quirky and fun to read. Since "The Undertaking" was written in the late 1990s, I'm guessing that I didn't notice it on a bestseller list or read any recent press about it. So, it probably made it's way to my shelf based on the "quirky and fun" criteria. I was expecting a few hundred pages where you mix the writing style of Mary Roach, the real-life (to an extent, I know) behind-the-scenes look at a funeral home of Six Feet Under, with a dash of "this is what really happens behind closed doors" of Anthony Bourdain. Put all that together in some form or another and you've got a book I'd love to read!Sadly, "The Undertaking" was nothing at all like that. It was essentially a few hundred pages of philosophizing about life and death with a few anecdotes about the funeral home trade thrown in to the mix to bookend the soliloquies about life. Thomas Lynch certainly has an interesting outlook on life since his professional puts him so close to death every day. His overall message - which I think is a good one - is that a funeral and everything that takes place after someone is dead is really not about the recently deceased, but all about those left behind to mourn them. It may be nice that you want your favorite song played at your funeral, but if playing that song doesn't do anything for the people there to mourn you, then why play it? It isn't about you anymore. There are probably plenty of people in this world - maybe myself among them - that need to hear this message and realize what exactly the funeral home trade is there for... getting the dead body out of your house, sure, but really more about helping the living.It was mentioned repeatedly throughout the entire book that Lynch is a poet, likes poetry, hangs around with poets, has people request him to write poetry and is a published poet. I certainly don't mind poetry (though, to be frank, I don't read much of it), but the prose in this book was trying just too hard to be poetry, and it really didn't work. It often meant that the stories and lessons and sermons Lynch was sharing about his life and (a little) about the funeral home business were neither interesting and easy to read (if he were to err on the side of being less poetic), or outright poetic and thought-provoking (if he were to err on the side of being more poetic). Instead, most of the book was caught in the awkward middle.
I had hoped for much more from this book. It received good notices and won the American Book Award. But there were a few aspects of the book and the writing that put me off, and I quit at the halfway point.First, I would very much like publishers to stop putting out essay collections that appear to be continuous narratives. Such a form can be done well (Atul Gawande's BETTER achieved a continuity with a consistent theme and editing that reinforced it, despite the fact that it was clearly a collection), but more often it seems a cheat to readers who are hoping to pick up a book on a single subject. Instead they get a loose collection of short pieces that may or may not relate to the subject in which they were interested. That is the case here.Second, I'm afraid I found Thomas Lynch's style overly adorned and florid. This is probably in part because, in addition to being an undertaker, he is also a poet. His poetic tendency leads him, ironically, to say more when it would do to say less. I enjoyed some parts of some of his stories, but I knew I would have enjoyed them more if many of his descriptions, asides, and opinions had been trimmed away. This is a matter of taste, I suppose, but I was less able to enjoy the stories, because I was rarely allowed to forget that it was Thomas Lynch telling them. He seemed very concerned that his voice be prominent, and I guess I just don't like that voice.(I don't mean to suggest that contemporary nonfiction be devoid of personality and idiosyncrasy, but writers who are enamored of their own voices can often in the reader's way, of being too intrusive a mediator of the message.)Third, there are too many single-sentence paragraphs.Fourth: puns.And, finally, fifth, I honestly never got what I came for. The conceit of the book, at least in part, is that Lynch will conduct us through a world that he is well-prepared to share with us: that of the funeral business. But far too often he drifts far afield, and the straightforward details I would expect from such a book are imparted only partially, and often in passing. Clearly he has a viewpoint that he would like to share, and that viewpoint sometimes stands in opposition to earlier books published about his trade. But he does not marshal the facts as often as necessary, and he sometimes falls back on generalizations and wry opinion when the truly convincing evidence one needs is old-fashioned example.
What do You think about The Undertaking: Life Studies From The Dismal Trade (1998)?
Karon Luddy May 20, 2004The UndertakingtThis is an exquisite obsidian of a book. tThe literary equivalent of a funeral—for a funeral.tIt’s about how life and death spend all their time rubbing up against each other. Essentially, the book explores a truth we try to forget in our every waking moment: It’s in our nature to die. My emotional response to this sublime book is that it cheered me up considerably. Ironic, huh?tThe title is perfect. Works on at least three levels: undertaking as a profession; the undertaking for writing this particular text; and the undertaking of Life itself. The subtitle is perfectly appropriate too: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. The reader knows what she’s getting into, plus the words dismal trade broadcast the writer’s sense of humor and irony. tThe cover is perfect. The front is all black with a hand holding a business card with the title and the author’s name; the back cover is a tag line for an undertaker, but also serves as the first sentence in the book. tFour beautifully appropriate epigrams prepare the reader for the quirky, poetic wisdom that will follow on the vast subject of Death and its relation to Life. Jane Kenyons’s passage at the top about finding the God that had been promised is spiritually satisfying. The Kurt Cobain quote, denying he had a gun is so damn poignant. tThe structure of the book is straightforward: a preface, 12 essays, notes on the illustrations. The author’s great undertaking is to tell us all about the business of death and he succeeds wonderfully.
—Karon Luddy
As far as Lynch's way with the written word, and even the subject matter, this book deserves close to five stars.However, as the streak of Conservative Irish Sentimental Paternalism and Misogyny became more of a wide river throughout the book, it became harder and harder for me to stomach. Yes, let's reflect on how things were better before there were things like indoor plumbing and reliable birth control for women. Lets put things from the "modern world" in quotation marks.By the time it got to a passage that basically read --He moped around the corners of her life for a week or two that would be called "stalking" now --I both slightly admired the wordplay but also grunted in disgust, yeah, you chauvinist dick, it would probably be called "stalking" now because it actually was stalking, and the book went flying gently across the living room floor.
—Adam Swift
A friend recommended this memoir by a Michigan Funeral Director- a Remembrance of Things Past and Getting Rancid, if you will- and it varied for me. Beginning and end, which talked more about the subject at hand, were nicely done. Middling the two were some tangents into the author's Other Life as a sometime published poet, sometime Irish resident, sometime experiencer of divorce and disappointment in and around his life. I'd leave that part out of the service.Since his Michigan haunts are near those once worked, not long ago, by one Dr. Jack Kervorkian, Lynch talks quite a bit about the logistics and ethics of that companion to his business. In the end, he lays out some fairly detailed instructions for what he does and doesn't want in connection with his own demise- and then explicitly excuses his heirs, successors and assigns from following them if they choose to go another way. As it should be.
—Ray
