Volume 11, Number 6 · October 10, 1968
The Trouble I've Seen
By Jack Richardson
A Mass for the Dead
by William Gibson
Atheneum, 448 pp., $7.95
When I Was Last on Cherry Street
by Harry Roskolenko
Stein & Day, 256 pp., $4.95
The Terrorized
by Harry Roskolenko
Prentice-Hall, 230 pp., $5.95
William Gibson's A Mass for the Dead is many things—it is an autobiography, a memorial to the author's parents, a testament for his children, and a long musing on the continuity of generations. Primarily, however, it is, as the title suggests, a ritual; and, indeed, like the ecclesiastical form used as the structure of the book, it is a ritual meant to buttress the imagination against human impermanence and to fix our passing time into categories of literary observation. This desire to ritualize and thereby subdue mortality is, of course, fundamental to most autobiographical writing, but seldom has it been insisted on so tenaciously as in A Mass for the Dead. Almost every page pivots about death and memory until even the simplest recollections become reminders that they occur within lives which are dying away and which are held back from oblivion only by the author's fierce recollective hold on them. And Gibson does hold on fiercely: poetry, biblical rhetoric, offertory pleas—these are only some of the items of literary ordinance which he brings to bear on his past and which make one feel that he has set out to write a complete existential missal of his own or, at the very least, a guidebook for all future meditation on human evanescence.
Review, 2481 words
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