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A MESSY LIFE by John Schwartz

A MESSY LIFE

by John Schwartz

Publisher: Joss International

After the death of his wife, an author goes on the road and writes an eclectic memoir. 

Schwartz (In the Shadow of Babylon, 2011) lost his wife of 41 years to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. The descent into death was a slow one for Emily and ultimately involved the painful deterioration of her body. When she finally died, the author sold his impressive home nestled within a golf course—the one Emily grew up in—and set out on a kind of therapeutic walking tour, collecting new friends and adventures along the way. One day, he received a book in the mail—it turned out to be a memoir Emily wrote unbeknownst to him—and that remembrance inspired him to pen his own. Schwartz darts quickly back and forth between the remote and more proximate pasts—sometimes he details his family’s ancestry, his previous two marriages, or his travels with Emily through Italy and Japan. His meditations frequently refer to or even revolve around the libidinal pull of sex: his sexual escapades in Asia, his youthful philandering, his fascination with erections, and the peculiar relationship between sexuality and shame. Schwartz also discusses his shiftless youth—he was rescued from a drunken driving arrest at the age of 17 when a compassionate police officer promised to ditch the paperwork if he joined the Air Force (and so he did). The author became a very successful businessman—he was a millionaire by 30—as well as an award-winning writer. As the title suggests, this volume is an untidy mélange of recollections and commentary, so compulsively digressive that it often becomes exhausting. Schwartz becomes focused when he movingly writes of his love for Emily, with the book as a whole a kind of meandering love letter to her. The stories he shares are sometimes hilarious, but the prose overall is manically quip-laden and often remarkably condescending. In one painful scene, he sententiously lectures a priest on the moral failings of religion (“Muslims worldwide and from all walks of life…unequivocally and unapologetically proclaim that Islam instructs them to hate, subjugate, and kill all who resist it”). It’s impossible not to be touched by the author’s tender affection for his wife, but the work as a whole is maddeningly disorganized and smug. 

Despite some genuinely beautiful recollections, this account remains too haphazardly constructed to sustain the reader’s attention.