Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
By David Rakoff
Doubleday
113 pp, $32
Reviewed by John Barton
Anyone who follows This American Life or Wiretap will know of David Rakoff, the Canadian-born humourist, who died of cancer in 2012 at 47. Journalist, broadcaster, screenwriter, actor, and artist, he published three books of essays that won two Lambda Literary Awards and a James Thurber Prize for American Humor. Hardbound with a die-cut cover, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish was published in the summer of 2013, a year after the author’s death. A novel in verse, it is illustrated by Toronto cartoonist Seth; his portraits of Rakoff’s characters sit on the heavy creamy stock disingenuously and resistant to bleed-through.
Rakoff’s narrative strategy is a memorable example of six degrees of separation. The characters—or clusters of characters, all mostly strangers to one another—are scattered in time and place from New York to Chicago, Burbank, and San Francisco, each sometimes making only one star turn or cameo as the twentieth century unfolds from just before the First World World War to the late-century AIDS crisis, before spilling in rhyming couplets into the third millennium. As one storyline is cast off for another, readers may wonder if the spun-out narratives will ever twine into one coherent thread. Hints of how they might are dropped here and there. For example, the first story closes with Margaret, a 13-year-old, Chicago meatpacker escaping an abusive stepfather, being saved from the deathly cold in a westward-hurtling boxcar by a Yiddish-whispering hobo, who holds her inside his coat. In the next story, we learn he is Hiram, the dying father of Clifford, an artistic boy growing up queer in Los Angeles during the 1920s.
Because any real ties between the book’s characters are few, we turn Rakoff’s hundred-and-first page (with only twelve to go) speculating that he may have died before he could shore up his shaky narrative arc. However, he pulls everything together in the last twenty lines. That we close the book appreciating how tenuously his characters are interconnected, even if his characters never do themselves, permits Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish to make an impassioned claim for poignancy.
This novel in verse is no Changing Light at Sandover; nor is it another Autobiography in Red, but it does belong to a tradition of light verse that Americans have excelled at since the Gilded Age (Rakoff became a U.S. citizen in 2003). It’s as entertaining as anything Don Marquis or Dorothy Parker wrote. Anyone familiar with “The Night Before Christmas” should easily recognize the verve of Rakoff’s versifying ambitions.
Though I found his reliance on near-exact rhymes exhausting, his wit amused me throughout. A good example is a passage from the point of view of Sloan, a control-freak realtor who lives an Upper East Side dream that her incontinent mother-in-law renders nightmarish:
The family was blessed and seemed wholly awash
In the kind of good fortune one doesn’t dare dream,
Near-parodically copious, bursting the seams
Of the sky; heaven-sent, like the biblical gift of the manna,
Until her thoughts happened to land upon Hannah.
One Hannah hint seems to be all that it takes
For Sloan’s inner Lexus to slam on the brakes.
I may not own a car, but my solar plexus spasmed with mirth.
Rakoff also succeeds at moving his readers. We last see Clifford, one of his few recurring characters, as he laboriously succumbs to HIV:
What a difference a day makes. Now times that by twenty.
Clifford was hollow, a Horn of Un-Plenty.
Tipping the scales at one-fifteen at most
He was more bone than flesh now, and less man than ghost.
The CMV daily lay waste to his sight
Now, it was all Renoir smearings of light,
I loathe Renoir, Clifford thought, chocolate-box hack.
Chuckling, his hacking cough wrenching his back.
For light verse, this passage is very dark, affirming that such poetry can be serious honestly. A gay man, Rakoff lived in New York through the AIDS crisis and must have witnessed countless friends and acquaintances die. One cannot help imagining their deaths returned to him while writing the very darkest moments of this posthumous book.
I also wonder if the chocolate-box reference is not a wry putdown of Forrest Gump, that loathsomely saccharine movie that for far too long allows its eponymous central character to recount his bathetic life. Despite the light-footedness of this verse, there’s nothing too sweet about Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. Though their stories are often pathetic, pathos lightens how Rakoff chose to let his characters live out what we see of their lives.
John Barton is the editor of The Malahat Review.