From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and
wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century
Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life,
David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and
funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and
tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of
an altogether different art form.
LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as
Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating,
or brutal.
The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or
cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in
early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers
an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a
vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed
dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the
casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern
California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of
1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the
AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle
reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles
under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the
new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace
in a photograph he discovers in an old box--an image of pure and simple
joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work.
Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish
world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called
Rakoff magnificent, a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel
in verse.
