Review
Thomas Lynch begins each of his stories with a disaster. Deaths, divorces, cremated ashes, and autopsied bodies: these are the opening images and situations of a Lynch story. If you know Thomas Lynch the poet and essayist or Thomas Lynch the funeral director of Milford, Michigan, then these beginnings will not shock you. But even if you do not already know Lynch's earlier works or primary profession, his debut fiction collection is filled with the sorts of lives that you might expect from a thirty-five year veteran of the death industry.
Undertakers, housewives, fishermen, casket salesmen, and ministers: these are the characters who Lynch selects for his feeling, searching stories and novella. Indeed, these fictional lives feel so honest and genuine that it is hard not to assume they come directly from Lynch's experiences as the director of his family's funeral home in...
Beyond the Book
If the subject of the Inevitable piques your interest, may we suggest...
If you're looking for funeral fiction, William Faulkner's
As I Lay Dying is the king of the canon. Its curious style creates a moving portrait of the Bundren Family attempting to bury its matriarch Addie Bundren. With almost sixty chapters and fifteen narrators, the novel is a diverse portrait of familial grief. Another brilliant account of death in the South is Eudora Welty's
The Optimist's Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. The passing of Judge Clint McKelva is the occasion for the novel, but his funeral and memory provide more than enough emotion and drama for his surviving daughter and young window. For something more contemporary, try Ian McEwan's
Amsterdam, a...
