Ten Years in the Tub (60 page)

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Into the Wild
—John Krakauer

     
  
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
—Ken Dornstein

     
  
The March
—E. L. Doctorow

     
  
Freakonomics
—Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

L
ast month I read Marjane Satrapi's two Persepolis books and Kurt Vonnegut's
A Man Without a Country
, and I seem to recall that I described the experience as somewhat gloomy. Ha! That was nothing! I didn't know I was born! I now see that the time I spent in Satrapi's horrific postrevolutionary Iran, and the time I gave over to Vonnegut telling us that the world is ending, were the happiest days of my life. The end of the world? Bring it on! With the honorable exception of
Freakonomics
, the most cheerful book I read this month was Jon Krakauer's
Into the Wild
, the story of how and why a young man walked into the Alaskan wilderness and starved (or perhaps poisoned) himself to death.
Into the Wild
wins the Smiley Award because it has a body count of one. Ken Dornstein's memoir
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
begins and ends with the Lockerbie disaster in 1988, when a Pan Am plane blew up over a Scottish village, killing all 259 passengers, including the author's older brother David. And E. L. Doctorow's novel
The March
describes William Sherman's
journey from Atlanta up to North Carolina, and just about everybody dies, some of them in ways that you don't want to spend a long time thinking about.

I was actually in North Carolina when I finished
The March
—this is something I like to do when I'm particularly enjoying a novel, despite the cost. (Did you know that there's no such planet as Titan? Vonnegut just made it up. They could have put that on the jacket, no? Oh well. You live and learn.) A couple of days later I passed the book on to one of my travelling companions, Dave Bielanko of the mighty band Marah, and he in return gave me the Krakauer book. It's what you do when you're on the road. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of, like, brotherhood and stuff. We were actually on the road between Memphis, Tennessee, and Oxford, Mississippi, a journey that takes approximately ninety minutes, and those forty-five minutes were the only chunk of road I experienced. But never mind! I was there, swapping books, and, you know, looking out of the window. (And Oxford, Mississippi, is yet another place in the U.S. that I want to move to. Everyone there is a writer, or a musician, or someone who hasn't yet bothered doing either thing but could if he or she wanted to. And the mayor runs the bookstore, and in Faulkner's house you can read the plot outline he wrote in pencil on the wall, and you can see the can of dog repellent he kept by his desk, and the sun shines a lot.)

It's a strange experience, reading Ken Dornstein's memoir immediately after I'd finished
Into the Wild
, because there were occasions when it seemed as though Dornstein and Krakauer were writing about the same young man. Here's Chris McCandless, the doomed explorer, at college: “During that final year in Atlanta, Chris had lived off campus in a monkish room furnished with little more than a thin mattress on the floor, milk crates and a table.” And here's David Dornstein: “David's room was a classic writer's Spartan cell—a desk, a chair, a mattress on the floor, books stacked all around.” Both David Dornstein and McCandless spend an awful lot of time underlining meaningful passages in classic literature; these passages will later be discovered by future biographers, and both of these young men seemed to presume that there would be future biographers, because they left hundreds of pages of notes. David Dornstein, who wanted passionately to write, frequently imagines that his future biographer will have to piece together his work from these notes (chillingly, more
than once he imagines himself killed in a plane crash); McCandless refers to himself in the pseudonymous third person—he was “Alexander Supertramp.” Both of them have a taste for a slightly affected mock-heroic voice. And both of them seem doomed.

David Dornstein wasn't doomed in the same way as Chris McCandless, of course. McCandless chose to walk almost entirely unequipped into deadly terrain in order to live out some half-baked neurotic Thoreau fantasy. David Dornstein simply got on a routine passenger flight from London to New York, but what is remarkable about Ken Dornstein's memoir is that his brother's tragic and ungovernable fate seems like an organic part of the story he's telling. Someone sent me a proof copy of
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
a while back, and I didn't think I was going to read it, partly because I couldn't imagine how it could be a
book
. To put it crudely and brutally, my anticipated problem was all in the title: whatever David's story was, it would be ended by a random, senseless explosion. (I'd been afraid of exactly the same thing with my brother-in-law's novel
Pompeii
—how can you create a narrative arc when you're just going to dump a load of lava on people's heads?) I don't know whether it's tasteless to say that the end of his life makes sense, but that's the unlikely trick that his brother pulls off.

Creating narrative coherence out of awful accident is, I suppose, a textbook way of dealing with this sort of grief (and grief, of course, is mostly what this book is about). It's partly Dornstein's skill as a writer that makes the raw material seem tailor-made for the form he has chosen, but the lives examined here are also freakishly appropriate for this kind of examination. It's not just the notes that his brother left, the half-finished stories and abandoned novels and instructions to literary executors, the letter to David from his father that explains and explores the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Ken ends up married to David's college girlfriend, but before they get there the two of them have to work out, slowly and painfully, whether there's any more to their relationship than a shared loss. And David wanted Ken to become the writer he feared he would never be, so the very existence of
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
provides another layer of complication. It's a compelling, sad, thoughtful book, and I'm glad I picked it up.