AFTERLIFE

An alphabetical accounting of art and memory in the wake of grief.

With little narrative structure to constrain her, Woodward is free to wander her own thoughts and emotions, tracing the scars death leaves behind. This is a strange catalogue of things imagined amid painful feelings, all intertwined in a surprisingly bottled up package. Nominally a novel but in execution a keen synthesis of fact and fiction, the book takes the form of 36 micro essays and stories presented alphabetically by title, from “Afterlife” and “Birds in Art” through “Elton John,” “Insects,” “Rye Crackers,” and “Xyz.” Death hangs over what narrative there is, as in the title story, whose narrator admits to having troubling visions of her own demise. She’d lost her troubled sister, Vicky, who died from a degenerative illness three weeks earlier. The other narrative thread involves a U.S. Army experiment conducted over Minneapolis in 1950 that caked the city in cadmium to simulate a nuclear attack. Punctuated by tiny fictions and brief, unsettling reflections on her sister, the narrator also touches on the works of novelist John O’Hara, generational wreckage caused by Black Beauty, and the nature of romance in Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex. In one essay, a poet ponders the nature of words, while another essay asks what it means to eat insects, and a third remarks on the casual sexism of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not that the book isn’t funny from time to time: Sylvia Plath’s legacy is deemed “a fitting arc for a poet’s life: struggle, success, marriage, extinction.” In another note, the narrator drily comments, “This shows you how generally inappropriate my reactions are to the backbone of my society.” By the time she talks at any length about her sister—“I wasn’t going to feel sorry for her. I wasn’t sorry”—readers may not know whether to believe her or not.

A cabinet full of unsettled ideas with a universe of language behind it.