|
Mike, the
perfectly healthy first-person narrator of A Happy
Death, a comic novel, wants to die. Thanks to modern
medicine and diet control and a life spent safely
sitting down, he will likely live to the ripe eighties
or beyond to the overripe nineties, but he’d be happy to
end before then. Well before then. Mike decides his
current age of fifty-something is advanced enough. He’s
seen his marriage fail, his daughter grow up into a
shrew, and his retirement from The Aspirin Institute
after a career of twenty-six years soured by regret and
emptiness. There’s nothing more to live for. But there’s
a surprise catch: Things to live for keep turning up.
Odd things,
such as buying shoes for the strange women he drives
across the country in a van he calls his woody as they
write up his blog The Driver’s Journal. A history buff
and come-lately patriot, Mike also accumulates a
van-load of American-made souvenirs on his journeys that
he conveys with him to his final dwelling, a shack on
the Ohio River, displaying them in a room he calls his
Kitsch Museum. He hopes that the shack, an affordable
place on a river he loves, and his collection of
oddities, and his handyman Bill, and his nearness to two
genuine historical sites, US Grant’s birthplace and the
Underground Railroad, will amuse him until he dies.
|
