'[sic]: A Memoir': Death, interrupted
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Joshua Cody: "Time isn't a substance that flows or flies and can thus be traced." -
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Joshua Cody waits until about two-thirds into his fierce and fevered memoir "[sic]" to die. Not that checking out isn't a big deal, but Mr. Cody has bigger ideas on his mind.
One of them was to write a memoir about cancer that didn't make him sick. You know what he means: "pale pastel book after book, each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there's more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe. If there are some who require disease to teach them such things then fine, but I am not, was not, one of those, thank you very much."
Norton ($24.95).
And yet you could break "[sic]" into acts, given enough time and bourbon, even divine a few butterfly revelations. It's the way Mr. Cody tells his life's death story that feels new, his rush and cry of ideas and images and little jokes about being a good Midwestern boy.
The result is rare in memoir and uncommon in any book: an old story that's never happened before.
"Time isn't a substance," he writes, "that flows or flies and can thus be traced: unlike space, it cannot lurk behind a map of itself." Still, the timeline is clear. While weightlifting, Mr. Cody notices what feels like a pulled muscle in his neck. He goes to a doctor. He goes to another doctor. The pulled muscle is a malignant tumor. Chemo follows but doesn't take. Later a bone marrow transplant -- the ragged "salvage treatment" that nearly kills him.
It is the story Mr. Cody winds around this ordeal that feels fresh; it's fun to hear him think, even about horrible things. And like all good memoirs, "[sic]" is less about its writer's singular trial -- though there is plenty of that -- than it is about universal experience, the large and treasured world beyond the guy who doesn't want to die.
Music, for instance. Mr. Cody is a composer -- he was teaching at Columbia when he fell ill -- and he lays down ascendant riffs on Debussy and John Lennon, about Mozart and the title track from "Some Girls." And about Klee and Foucault and David Lynch and Brett Favre and Orson Welles -- two hours from dying, talking with Merv Griffin on TV about how he'll never write the story of his life -- and the writer David Foster Wallace, whom Mr. Cody mourns and resurrects in the way his sentences bounce and jolt. Also: sex. For a guy who's dying, Mr. Cody has a lot of sex, really doctoral-level hyper-epic sex, which sounds about right.
And, always, death. (He describes the discomfort that preceded his almost-exit like being trapped in a bar in which "the mediocre techno's a little too loud.") He lingers on loss. A college roommate, dead by suicide, Mr. Cody the one to identify the body. His father, who returns in a dream to tell him what it's like to die. "Fiery," he says. "But totally unlike what you would imagine. And actually, not so bad."
"[sic]" is a map that points to what you can lose and all you can gain if you're paying attention, what it feels like to die and to be alive and to know, really, what that means. And -- though it might make Joshua Cody cringe to hear it -- the beauty of it all.
First Published January 29, 2012 12:00 am
