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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
The End Before the End a review by Barbara Bennett Jill McCorkle. Life After Life. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2013.
See NCLR 2006 for Barbara Bennett’s essay on Jill McCorkle’s novel Ferris Beach. Bennett’s books include Comic Visions, Female Voices: Contemporary Women Novelists and Southern Humor (Louisiana State University Press, 1998), Understanding Jill McCorkle (University of South Carolina Press, 2000), Soul of a Lion: One Woman’s Quest to Rescue Africa’s Wildlife Refugees (National Geographic, 2010), and Sheherazade’s Daughters: The Power of Storytelling in Ecofeminist Change (Peter Lang Publishing, 2012). Read a short story by Jill McCorkle in NCLR 1997 and hear the author read her story “Your Husband Is Cheating on Us,” available on NCLR’s Mirth Carolina Laugh-Tracks, a dual CD set of humorous readings and music that accompanied the 2008 humor issue. Life After Life is McCorkle’s tenth novel. She is also the author of four collections of short stories.
above right Jill McCorkle with her mentor, Louis Rubin (1923–2013), in Hillsborough, NC, July 2013
Writing a death has to be one of the hardest scenes to create. I’ve had to do it a couple of times in a nonfiction work, and it was, to put it mildly, tricky. You can’t be too sentimental or your audience will feel emotionally manipulated. On the other hand, it is death we’re talking about, so too much distance would seem insensitive. It’s a tightrope walk. Enter Jill McCorkle, who by my own count, describes no less than twelve deaths in her newest book, Life After Life. Maudlin – never. Insensitive – certainly not. In fact, most of her deaths are quite beautiful. Take this, for instance, in her description of Curtis Edward Lamb’s dying vision: “The Ferris wheel is all she can talk about and he has promised her that he will go with her, turning and turning and turning, the lights so bright and buzzing in the distance he has to look away” (78). Or this one about Lois Flowers: “if she stands perfectly still, she can feel the building sway, the whole city below her is so bright and beautiful it leaves her lightheaded and she feels the building sway, back and forth like a song, like a slow and easy swaying song” (13). Each of these characters is at the place beyond belief, somewhere between life and death, seeing both places at once, and it is a spot the rest of us can hardly imagine. McCorkle, though, seems to have a visionary ability to position us there, along with each character. Why so many deaths? The novel is set mainly at a retirement home called Pine Haven Estates in Fulton, NC. (Fulton is also the setting of two of McCorkle’s previous novels, Ferris Beach [1990] and Carolina Moon [1996], both of which have characters who are referred to in this novel – a little treat for long-term McCorkle fans.) One of
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the main characters is Joanna, a hospice worker who sees innumerable characters through their last journey in this life. Each transition from life to death seems real, is somehow unique and monumental. Despite the number of deaths, each one feels important, and McCorkle never lets us forget that we are reading about people and lives that are significant in both their living and their dying. In the novel, we hear many voices, and it often seems as if we’re being told a story while we sip lemonade on the back porch. Joanna’s voice – and the other seventeen voices the author uses in this complex novel – represents McCorkle’s authorship at its most mature. She has taken on multiple points of view before – in July 7th (1984), Tending to Virginia (1987), and Carolina Moon – but never before has she been quite this convincing. This book gives us McCorkle at her most sure, a writer who knows what she’s doing and does it brilliantly. As with several of McCorkle’s earlier novels, the plotline of Life After Life is hard to describe. With the exception of Ferris Beach, McCorkle has resisted the traditional order of exposition, climax, and denouement. Instead she builds a spider’s web with plot and subplots intersecting, weaving, and shooting off in unexpected ways, creating an intricate and complex story that defies easy summary. She creates a world like the real one we live in – where nothing is simple and people’s lives connect and disconnect sometimes with effect, and sometimes without our ever knowing it. Also, like her earlier novels, she circles back around to her favorite themes and conflicts: success and failure, love and loss, truth and illusion. We watch while