The Obituary Writer: A Novel
Best-selling novelist Hood (The Red Thread, 2010) has fashioned a diptych of two seemingly unconnected women. Claire, an unhappy suburban housewife and mother inspired by John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and Jackie’s glamour, has a brief, ultimately tragic affair. Lovely and romantic Vivien, an English teacher in San Francisco, falls in love with a married man who disappears in the Great Earthquake of 1906. Bereft, she becomes the most sympathetic and poetic of obituary writers. Vivien is hypnotic; her vocation provides moving testimony to the healing power of language, and her wrenching story offers fascinating glimpses into the prejudices and traumas of her time. Claire’s predicament anticipates the first stirrings of the second wave of feminism, but it’s a tired tale flattened by melodrama, and readers will discern the connection between the women long before its disclosure. Still, Hood’s language is fine and supple, the settings are lusciously rendered, the melancholy air is seductive, her use of quotes about bereavement from Emily Post’s 1922 Etiquette is bittersweet, and her intricate inquiry into grief, guilt, and love is haunting. --Donna Seaman