Speak, Memory

Each man’s memory is his own private literature.
—Aldous Huxley

In Hirokazu Koreeda’s 1998 film After Life, the recently deceased arrive at an unnamed community and are told that over the course of a week, a counselor will help them recreate and film the single memory from their lives that they can take with them into the next world. Some refuse to participate because they are unable or unwilling to limit themselves to just one and eventually become counselors since they can never leave.

Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Brief History of the Dead posits quite the opposite situation, with an afterlife city whose inhabitants spend most of their time obsessing over a multitude of memories and delighting over the minutia they were too busy to notice while they were alive. The paradox of their existence is that it’s dependent on the memories of the living. When nobody is left on Earth to remember them, the inhabitants simply disappear. The tranquility of this stasis is disrupted by an escalation of disappearances, triggered by the spread of a plague in the land of the living.

Beginning with his short stories and continuing through his debut meta-novel The Truth About Celia, memory and loss have been recurring motifs in Brockmeier’s fiction, forcing introspection on hitherto blissfully ignorant characters. In The Brief History of the Dead, Brockmeier ups the ante, adroitly weaving two distinct narratives, that of the living and that of the dead, and crafts an achingly beautiful novel where the dead rely on the living for survival and the living survive through the act of remembering.

The living in this case is Laura Byrd, a scientist-turned-cola-shill, who is trapped alone in an Antarctic research station; the result of a publicity stunt gone horribly awry. As she experiences what she discovers will be her last days, memories of everyone who ever entered her life help prolong her sanity. At one point, she reflects “the best thing she’d ever done with her life was probably some small, half-conscious act of kindness she had long forgotten”. But it is over 30 years worth of these half-conscious acts that are responsible for those who remain in the unnamed city of the dead. Her story is equal parts Call of the Wild and I Am Legend, as Brockmeier expertly details both her struggle to stay sane in the face of her solitude and her bitter fight against the frigid forces of nature.

The memories, however, provide most of the narrative muscle in The Brief History of the Dead. Brockmeier extracts humanity out of his characters through them as they reflect on their previous existence. For these characters, it’s the little things that suddenly matter most. In Brockmeier’s prose, the characters are not forged by the infrequent trial or tribulation they experienced in life, rather they are defined by the accumulation of the small details they never bothered to notice. The slow-motion apocalypse that the characters experience gives these memories, as well as the reading experience, added poignancy.

Another terrific aspect of this book, and one that keeps its lugubrious subject matter from veering into saccharine sentiment, is the author’s vision of the future. It’s a future mired more in corporate hubris and idiocy than it is fascistic dystopia. Despite portraying a world that is perpetually at war, Brockmeier’s jabs are satirical and lack the strident didacticism that populates most speculative fiction, sharing an absurd plausibility with the works of Kurt Vonnegut. In Brockmeier’s imagination, Coca-Cola generates a mountain of free publicity by bulk mailing envelopes filled with white powder; triggering a fear of biological terrorism. In the afterlife, corporate executives still clump together and show up for their old jobs and hold endless meetings. One particularly amusing episode has an afterlife executive sneaking into his office in order to shred documents that might link his corporation, which technically doesn’t exist anymore, to the plague that is wiping out humanity. As the citizens of the city ponder the meaning of their lives, and find beauty and comfort with each moment of introspection, others go out of their way to add importance to the banal.

Ultimately The Brief History of the Dead is a deliberation about the nature of existence itself. Without resorting to ontological verbiage, Brockmeier’s characters ruminate on the issues of life, death and existence with an almost childlike sense of wonder. Early in the novel, the narrator comments:

The simple truth was that nobody knew what would happen to them after their time in the city came to an end, and just because you had died without meeting your God was no reason to assume that you wouldn’t one day.

Here, Brockmeier shows the reader not only that there is no way to know what happens to us after we die, but also that there are seemingly endless reverberations associated with every human interaction we experience.