John Updike Passes

I was sad to read about John Updike's death today.

I first heard of it in an email from a friend who was also upset. He wrote, "Oh man, John Updike died."

I think that expressed my state of mind. Genuine regret, but not real pain. I did not know the man, after all.

Here's what I'm wondering though: Why are we sad when notable, great people pass away?

Updike is a great writer. I have enjoyed his work in the past, but I am nowhere close to having read all of his material. So, I know I'm not upset because he won't be producing new pieces. It's not a personal loss. There seems to just be some general sense of sadness that passes through us all when a larger-than-life figure leaves us.

John Updike on Charlie Rose. Updike interview starts 22:59.

Fantastic Death

I'm reading a new novel by Jonathan Carroll called The Ghost in Love that deals with the aftermath of a man not dying when he should, in a fantastical way. A representative of the angel of death is left in limbo, hanging out on Earth, waiting for him to die. In the meantime, this ghost in limbo falls in love with the man's ex-girlfriend, hence the title of the book. I've just started the novel, but so far, it is full of humor and the most beautiful, non-saccharine sentimentality.

Here's an excerpt that I particularly like:
"She fell in love easily but walked away just as easily from a relationship when it went bad. Some men—and there had been many of them—thought this showed she was coldhearted, but they were wrong. German Landis simply didn't understand people who moped. Life was too interesting to choose suffering. Although she got a big kick out of him, she thought her brother Guy, was goofy for spending his life writing songs only about things that either stank or sucked. In response, he drew a pictue of what her gravestone would look like if he designed it: a big yellow smiley face on it and the words I LIKE BEING DEAD!
Little did either of them know that she would like it when her time came to die, years later. German Landis would move into death as she'd moved into new schoos, relationships, or phases of her life: full speed ahead, hopes ahoy, heart filled like a sail with reasonalbe optimism and belief that the gods were fundamentally benevolent, no mater where she was."

I love the notion that Carroll is presenting here that personality and attitude in life can carry over in to the way a person moves into death. It makes for a fun, life-affirming—and death-affirming for that matter—narrative.

Alan Cheuse gave a poignant review of this novel, and nobel winner Jose Saramago's novel Death with Interruptions, which has recently been tranlated into English. That book is also on my list or to-reads.

David Foster Wallace, 1962–2008

I'm too profoundly sad to write my own comments on the suicide of David Foster Wallace today, but here are some lovely words from Laura Miller at Salon.com.

"Perhaps someday we'll be offered an explanation for why David Foster Wallace took his life on Sept. 12, but any reader can see how his fiction had, in recent years, moved into greater darkness. ...

Every author wants to sell books, to please his or her publisher, to reap critical accolades and to bask in the admiration of colleagues, and Wallace did want those things, at the same time that he was more than a little embarrassed by such desires and acutely aware of the fact that none of it could make him happy. However, all great writers -- and I have no doubt that he was one -- have a preeminent purpose: to tell the truth. David Foster Wallace's particular vocation was to allow us to see just how fraught and complicated, how difficult yet how necessary, that telling had become -- not just for him, but for all of us. What will we do without him?"

And the full piece is here.

Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies

Literary great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died Sunday at the age of 89. Writers just don't get more important than Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who challenged his nation by writing about some of the harshest realities of Soviet Communism in works like The Gulag Archipelago, which tells the history of the Gulag prison camps.

I'll refrain from chronicling his life because this New York Times article does it much more eloquently than I can in the limited time I have ... and in the limited space and attention-span offered by a blog. And there are so many noteworthy events that should be mentioned when talking about this man. I will note, when Robert Rauschenberg died, I thought it was impressive that his biography was four pages online. Solzhenitsyn's is eight pages!

There are some great interactive features on the NY Times page, too—a photo slideshow with some pictures that show awesome personality, what you'd expect from a Russian writer with lots of personality; some audio clips; etc.

July Poll Results

The question was "If you could live forever, would you want to?" And here are the results:

Yes: 8
No: 6
I don't Know: 4

I'm a little surprised by these answers. I thought most people would say no. (Granted most people voted that they either did not want to live forever or did not know how they felt.) Maybe my views come from being an English major and having the quaint literary knowledge of books like Tuck Everlasting. It's possible there actually would be something to gain from living forever. You would have the opportunity to learn a lot. But wouldn't it be awfully sad to watch people you love die when you were in this world for eternity? Then again, it's only a highly non-scientific poll on a blog. There's also the possibility that people didn't take it that seriously :)

Life and Death for Fictional Characters

OK: Spoiler alert for Indiana Jones, Sex and the City movie, Harry Potter, Lost if you're not caught up.

A few weeks back, we had a lot of discussion about narrative and fictional characters. I'd like to come back to that theme to talk about a trend I've noticed in recent years. We seem to be unwilling to kill off our beloved fictional characters.

When the Harry Potter series finished last summer with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there was massive speculation about whether book seven would end with his demise. Would Voldemort do him in? Would the two finish off each other in a final showdown? Would Harry lose to he who must not be named and would evil wizardry win the day? Well, no one really thought that would happen; it was a childrens' book after all. In a 2006 interview, about a year before the book was released, J.K. Rowling said she might kill Harry. So fans did open the novel wondering whether Harry Potter would still be alive when they closed it. But despite a good scare near the end in which Harry has a near-death experience, Harry survives the battle with Voldemort and goes on to marry his long-time love.

Similarly, before the recent Indiana Jones sequel came out in theaters, many fans wondered if this would be the movie in which Indiana Jones finally died. It has been 19 years since the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Harrison Ford is now 65 years old, old for an action star. The series seemed to be introducing a new generation of archaeologist/adventurer in Shia LaBeouf's character. And on top of that, one of the remarkable things about Indiana Jones as a hero has always been his fallibility—he's never seemed invincible or naturally strong. He comes across as an everyday man who is put in extreme circumstances that push him to his limits and force him to act in amazing ways. It would have fit his character arc very well for audiences to see him die on screen. But he does not die either.

Rumors popped up before the release of the Sex and the City movie that one of the beloved characters from the well-known TV show would die when the story hit the big screen. Early speculation especially centered around Samantha, who suffered breast cancer in the TV show. Producers and writers decided to keep all of the characters alive and well.

There are also TV shows like Lost that frequently blur the lines between life and death. Claire seems to recently have died, but she didn't even get a death scene. Instead, she just left her baby behind and got up and walked into the woods. Now she is with her father, Christian Shephard, who has become some type of Angel of Death on the show. Charlie visited Hurley, even though Charlie had drowned. Boone keeps finding ways to come back. So does Mr. Friendly. There are flashbacks and flash-forwards, so that even once a character has died in the present, we still see them as part of the show in flashbacks, and they may still exist in the present but have died in the future (as with Locke). Death is not treated as a permanent goodbye on Lost.

I wonder if this zeitgeist has something to do with our country being at war. We're under such stress and and see so much turmoil and death in reality, we don't want to feel it with our fictional characters. We want our fictional characters to have happy endings. And now that the economy has taken a turn for the worse, it's all the more motivation for things to work out in the land of not-so-real.

Last Wishes

Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dmitri, has decided to posthomously publish his father's last work, the beginnings of a novel called The Original of Laura. The book is not finished and is still in pieces on 3" by 5" notecards, Nabokov's trademark writing technique. Here's an interview with Dmitri in the New York Times. Before his death, Nabokov instructed his widow and his son to burn the notes for this book and never to let it be published. So, in publishing the work, Dmitri is going directly against his father's dying wishes.

I'm torn. On one hand, there are the man's desires for his last pieces of work. And he was a perfectionist: This work is unfinished. On the other hand, the writer's work exists separate from him/her once it is completed. You do not check with the author on how to interpret a novel. So, do you need to have their permission to publish?

How important is it to honor last wishes? Do they take priority over just doing the right or reasonable thing after that person is gone?