Obituary writer Bud Stanley has fallen into a funk, existing (not living) in his own life. Divorced (his wife left him for a coworker, an admittedly more interesting man), half-hearted in his job, Bud’s final straw comes when the blind date a coworker set him up with shows up at the bar just to tell him she’s had a better offer. So, in a case of drunken “wouldn’t it be funny”-ness, he publishes his own obituary in the newspaper he works for. (Who knew that could be illegal?) Now he’s facing being fired at the best (felony charges at the worst), as soon as HR can get the computer system to acknowledge Bud isn’t actually dead; it’s illegal to fire a dead person.
So as Bud waits to find out should he stay or should he go, he does the only logical thing: He goes to the wakes and funerals of total strangers to learn how to live again.
Oh look. He rises on the second day, not the third. Even in death you are a disappointment.
I finished this book still not 100% sure what I thought of it. For the most part Bud grated on my nerves; there is only so much flippant, self-destructive, overly-impressed with himself protagonist I can take. I know in the comics Deadpool says, “Fake smile hiding real pain”, but apparently Bud’s motto was “Flippant sarcasm hiding real shallowness”; almost everything just impacted on the surface with this man. To a small extent, Bud was like Ebenezer Scrooge in Guy Pearce’s A Christmas Carol; utterly indifferent to all the lessons people are trying to impart on him until it effects him directly, and even then he only mildly gets it. In fact, I was wondering why I was even bothering to read this book until I got to a eulogy someone gave at one of the funerals, and I just started ugly-crying; maybe because in some ways it was one of the first instances of real, honest, human emotion someone had shown up to that point.
The other characters I ran (thankfully) more hot than cold with. Howard, the owner of the newspaper, is portrayed as one of those gruff editors with a heart of gold that are so prevalent in newspaper fiction, while Bud’s fellow obit writer Tuan just for some reason reminded me of a slightly better hearted combination of Pfannee from the Wicked movie and the Eponine from the 2023 Broadway Backwards “One Day More”. Clara, the woman who gets Bud to start his trips to stare at other people’s grief, is strange and interesting and someone I’m not 100% what I think of; on reflection she slightly reminds me of Virginia Madsen in that one scene from Sideways where she’s talking about the grapes growing for the wine. My two absolute favorite characters were Bud’s landlord Tim and Leo, the boy who lives two doors down from Bud and has severe OCD. To be honest, Tim and Leo are the two people that make this book really worthwhile. Tim, if for nothing else, than the fact that his favorite pair of shoes is a pair of Bob Cousy PF Flyers.
I suppose what the book is going for is a “What would you do with your one perfect life?”/Kris Allen’s “Live Like We’re Dying”/Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying” vibe; I’m not 100% sure it hit its mark. Now maybe that’s because as someone who is hitting 40 next year, I didn’t appreciate the comment that by the time you’re in your forties the best parts of your life are well over, maybe that’s because in some ways this was a book that said a lot but nothing and went places and yet barely moved. Maybe it’s because for some unknown reason I went into this book thinking it was written by an Irish author and set in Ireland, and instead it’s set in New York City.
Heaven or hell hangs in the balance, my friend.” “Well, it’s in Brooklyn, so I think we have our answer.
Which now having read the book makes perfect sense; I don’t think this book would have actually worked being set in any other city. New York (and especially Brooklyn) has an energy to it that is uniquely its own.
The other thing is that Kenney takes healthy potshots at lawyers, millennials, and what I’m sure he’d call the “easily offended”; pronouns are apparently amusing and he hammers home the point that he thinks the business world trying to be inclusive is taking things too far with talk of “mansplaining” and how everyone who works in sensitivity training has absolutely no sense of humor. I know it’s supposed to be funny; I just found it tiresome.
So would I recommend the book? Kind of; when it’s good, it’s good, and you can push yourself through everything else. It has caused me to maybe pick up his next book, which is a memoir about rewriting his mother’s obituary, but I don’t think I’m in a rush to do that, and I wouldn’t pick up anything else he wrote. Which is a disappointment, because I was really eager to read this.
