Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, lovely, witty, and smart novel in verse whose scope spans the 20th century By his books and his radio essays for NPR’s This American Life, David Rakoff has constructed a deserved popularity as one of many most interesting and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the grasp of an altogether totally different artwork type. LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and many years as Rakoff sings the tune of an America whose freedoms will be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters’ lives are linked to one another by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse employees in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a determined selection; a hobo affords an sudden refuge on the rails through the Nice Despair; a vivacious aunt supplies her intelligent nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an workplace woman endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the younger man from Southern California revels within the electrifying sexual and creative openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying associates and lovers because the AIDS pandemic devastates the neighborhood he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a wedding crumbles underneath the excellence between self-actualization and humanity; as the brand new century opens, a person who has misplaced his approach finds a measure of peace in {a photograph} he discovers in an outdated field–a picture of pure and easy pleasure that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work. Rakoff’s insistence on magnificence and the need of kindness in a egocentric world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic as soon as known as Rakoff “magnificent,” a phrase that completely describes this excellent novel in verse.