From My Bookshelf: A Prayer for the Dying

Stewart O'Nan's novel A Prayer for the Dying is one of those rare second person novels. I didn't think I'd like this -- I'm always such a conventional writer -- but this is a phenomenal read. The narrator here (second person) is a preacher, mortician, sheriff of a small Civil-War era American town that suffers a horrendous plague which essentially is taking the life of every one. The book is a deliberately paced, hellish account of the town's demise and the narrator's gradual immersion in the death, dying, and suffering. 

The challenge, it seems to me, is writing this type of Apocalyptic novel with a heart. I'm a sucker for the dismal, desperate setting, the lone man cast against a bleak universe. That's a classic heroic narrative, and this novel follows that tradition in many ways. The preacher tries to keep his mind and his community together in the face of bleak odds and a rampaging, violent disease. O'Nan does manage to give the narrator (you) a kind of heart; but the overwhelming horror which encounters, scores of dead that include his own wife and child, make it hard for the novel to be about anything but what the narrator witnesses.  

That said, I like this book tremendously. I'm impressed by the story, and I'm impressed by the plot, which has a stunning turn near the conclusion. I think as a reader it's less important to me to have that "heart" than to compel the reader in some dramatic human way. There's no indulgence here, no rambling, no moralizing. I also admire the quickness and efficiency of the prose. There's very little wasted here. You (now I'm in second person) could easily see another writer mucking this story up with grand paragraphs on the nature of humanity, sickness, God, morality, etc. But O'Nan doesn't do that. (In some ways, I wonder what Cormac McCarthy would have done with this story.) I think he realized that at some point the most compelling thing about this novel's subject is the clean narrative line, what happens to this preacher/sheriff/mortician as he ambles through this personal hell. 

It is a book about humanity that does not romanticize the good or the bad in human beings. It is one of those books which moves me because it's so honest. The preacher is this lone, doubting, forlorn soul grappling with enormous issues of life, death, and sickness. O'Nan does a superb job of describing his thoughts without getting in the way, without being too 'writerly.' That's something I admire. The book speaks, not the author.