Going through the painstaking stages of grief. On Agee’s A Death in the Family.
The title really explains all you need to know about the book. Man dies, family griefs. There is really not much plot to the story save for the exploration of the different stages of grief and the lyrical language used to describe each micro-moment leading to the patriarch’s funeral. It is an intensely personal work and we have the feeling that more than for anybody else, Agee was writing the book first and foremost for himself.
The work was not a completed work, as there are some manuscripts which has not been finalised by the author, who tragically died from a sudden heart attack. The editors have meshed up the uncompleted manuscripts into the novel and it’s a good thing they did, as the added manuscripts felt like it belonged at the right place. In a bitter irony, the novel snagged a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for the author.
But it is not a novel for me. As ignorant as this sounds, I don’t think I can relate as I have not (thankfully) gone through the same experience. And it is perhaps the style which crawls at a lingering speed, a slow burn which takes its time to develop: the combination of Agee’s lyricism and the progression of each character’s mindsets to accept the death of the father. But this is not a fault of Agee’s style, just a personal preference.
It has an impact on others who had read the book though, especially those who had to deal with the same sort of experiences. Just have a look at this great review from Reardon and go through some of the reviews in Goodreads to see the impact the book had. In the end of the day, grief is a common human experience and reading the novel involves the reader, as they probably would when they go through a support group. Thus, the reading could be a cathartic release.
The novel is divided into three parts: the time before the death, the realisation of the death and the acceptance. Perhaps it is the second part which was the most engaging, as the family wrestles in their minds to deny the facts, the not knowing and the supposition of what if? It is compelling and heartbreaking to read as anybody who would go through any personal tragedy, though not knowing whether the tragedy in fact had happened or not.
In its poetry of small things, these very small things become the things that matter: the sounds of the carriages, the small physical contacts, the routines which has given meaning to every day life and will continue to do so, such as making up the bed. If for nothing else, read it for Agee’s prose. It may not be for everybody, as it wasn’t for me, but I can’t deny its lyrical beauty:
“But the men by now, one by one, have silenced their hoses and drained and coiled them. Now only two, now only one, is left, and you see only ghostlike shirt with the sleeve garters, and sober mystery of his mild face like the lifted face of large cattle enquiring of your presence in a pitchdark pool of meadow; and now too he is gone; and it has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by.”
