The Quarterly Book Report: Kevin Brockmeier's "The Brief History of the Dead"

The Dead, it would seem, live in a world not so dissimilar from our own. A parallel universe constructed much the same as our own. There are towns and streets and shops and newspapers. There are rich and poor. People go to work doing the same thing as they did when they were living. They are married to the same people, have the same friends, move in the same circles. The Dead try to recreate their life after death just as it had been when they were alive. And they don’t age. They are forever the age they were when they died. But the Dead, their world exists only as long as their memory is alive in someone’s mind. For instance, I would live in the next world only as long as someone I had known while alive, or had even met in passing, still lived. And because this world is created from the memory of someone still alive, only the good parts of a persons' life exist when they die. The living seem to have forgiving memories.

This is the afterlife Kevin Brockmeier creates in The Brief History of the Dead.

This version of the afterlife is created through a catastrophic event, a pandemic like none before. There is an unknown disease that strikes earth and within days wipes out almost every human. No one knows what the disease is or how it spreads. People develop symptoms and then are dead within a few hours. The only survivors are three researchers on Antarctica. They are in a remote outpost, even for Antarctica, and haven’t had any contact with anyone. So they are not exposed to the disease. But they are running out of supplies. Winter is coming. When they begin to run perilously low on supplies, they head out across the continent to their supply center.

The Dead have never really questioned why they are where they are. They seem to assimilate to their new home fairly quickly. It’s an easy process, as they are quickly surrounded by people they have known in their life. They seem to accept it when someone leaves them – when someone dead dies and moves on to whatever comes after death. These people disappear as soon as the last person who knew them dies. This is normal. But the catastrophic disease speeds up the disappearances. The Dead begin to wonder why so many people are disappearing so quickly. The Dead are disappearing so quickly that their cities are shrinking, their newspapers aren’t being delivered, they can’t find a decent hair-jelly. The Dead start putting the pieces together. They begin to figure out why they are still “alive.” They are alive because of their connections to the three researchers, the only three humans still alive.

So despite almost all of humanity dying, despite half of the book taking place in the land of the Dead, The Brief History of the Dead isn’t actually about the dead. It’s about how we remember – or forget – the people we meet in our lives. History, as the cliche goes, is often forgiving. Our uncle’s brutality in life is forgotten as we choose to remember the better aspects of his life. We remember his goof-ball jokes or his hard work ethic. We choose to remember the good things about those who die. One of Brockmeier’s unstated questions in the book seems to be: is this a good thing? Is it good to be so forgiving to the Dead? Is it good to forget about the mistakes those we were close to made during their lives? He doesn’t answer the question, he just constructs a world in which no one has faults, where no one has any knowledge of the faults of others. This sounds very much like Heaven.

The problem is, this isn’t Heaven. This is just another version of the same life people live on Earth. What comes after that...well, he doesn’t even speculate. So in essence, Brockmeier dodges the question of what actually happens after death. The second question unstated question of the book is: why can we only dream of places that we have been? For me, and for Brockmeier, that’s the real problem with death – trying to imagine what the next world will be like. If indeed there is a next life. Brockmeier's History is about how the living construct a world for the dead. It's about our inability to dream of a world very different from the one we now live in. Heaven is often just a better version of the life we already live rather than a completely different existence.

Brockmeier, for those of us from Arkansas, is a local boy – lives in Little Rock. He’s written several books, although this is the first one I’ve read. It’s very well written. He’s got talent, and he’s relatively unknown. At least I don’t hear much about him. And he writes a novel in which almost all of the characters are either dead or dying, and he does so without making this tragic. Which is an accomplishment.