Review: The Good Death of Kate Montclair by Daniel McInerny
The Good Death of Kate Montclair by Daniel McInerny
Chrism Press, 2023; 288 pp., $21.95
The Good Death of Kate Montclair uses one of my favorite rhetorical devices, in which an editor humbly presents a manuscript written by someone else. Perhaps the most famous of these is Lolita, which purports to be Humbert Humbert’s secret memoir composed in jail. But while Nabokov’s memoirist remains unrepentant, Kate Montclair styles herself a “catastrophist.” She carries within her the burden of an enormous past wrong, and her time for making amends is running short.
When Kate is diagnosed with a brain tumor in her mid-fifties, she refuses treatment and opts for an early exit with the assistance of her old teaching colleague Adele, who now leads the Death Symposium. At Adele’s suggestion, Kate is writing a memoir of her experience, which she asks her friend Benedict to edit after her death. Benedict grieves her decision so much that he cannot fulfill her request; he is determined to leave the memoir behind at Kate’s family home of Five Hearths. But the manuscript keeps finding him—turning up first in his suitcase and later at his hotel. This is the work of Miranda, a homeless, schizophrenic young woman whose name puts me in mind of The Tempest—though in some ways, she is more like Caliban than her namesake in that play.
A writer and beloved teacher of composition, Kate is at once archly funny and sweetly archaic. She expects her students to sign the “Apprentice’s Affidavit” as they turn in their work:
Thus acknowledging that I remain an apprentice
With still much to do on my way toward mastery
I commend this work to your discernment
Humbly requesting it be deemed acceptable
Pending the appropriate alterations.
We might all do well to submit such a statement alongside the account we must render at death.
Kate’s glioblastoma diagnosis soon brings together all the key players from the catastrophe of her youth, which takes place in Rome. It is here that the charismatic and mercurial Adele first interferes in Kate’s life; and now, after years of lapsed friendship, Kate approaches the Death Symposium longing both to be recognized by Adele and to slip past her unnoticed. Sporting an “icy white pixie” and dressed to the nines, Adele “look[s] like a woman to whom Nature had issued a challenge and who had risen to it with a spit in Nature’s face.”
But it is Miranda’s fate that particularly weighs on Kate’s conscience, especially when she turns up at the Death Symposium to discomfit Adele. Judging by her disheveled appearance—“on her head, she wore a black ski cap, from under which scraggly strands of hair, naturally dark but dyed with streaks of violet, escaped like the vines of an exotic creeping plant”—Miranda is off her medication again. But while Adele comes to seem like an angel of death, Miranda—with her secret recordings, her notebook full of deft drawings and flashes of insight—is a dangerous truth-teller. Kate makes it her mission to help Miranda before celebrating her “deathday liturgy” on the feast of All Souls.
Most of the novel’s main characters are lapsed Catholics, with some important exceptions: a crusading mother who objects to the permissive Adele; an order of nuns running a group home in Chappaqua, New York; and Miranda, who, along with her schizophrenic mother Veronica, claims to receive messages from the Blessed Virgin. For a long while, it seems that few of the novel’s rational actors take their faith seriously. But in Rome, a mysterious intruder secretly distributes the green scapular to couples who are living in sin, thus sowing the power of grace in the most unlikely places.
A whole host of characters populates The Good Death, and at times, I could have used a few signposts. I was particularly misled by Kate’s habit of calling her lover “Mr. Cody:” at first, I thought he was somebody’s dad. The writing, however, is natural, fluid, and catchy. And while the story is Kate’s, Veronica’s narrative offers critical plot support, along with some wonderful images. In her notebook, which Benedict reads after her death, Veronica writes that his disappointed face “hangs from his skull like an old coat upon a hook;” later, she says, “I’m reading Trollope but feeling Lindsay’s eyes scrambling over me like an insect.” Lindsay is Veronica’s roommate at the group home in Chappaqua—she is, in some ways, Veronica’s cross to bear. But she is also an excellent midwife to Veronica’s death, which should satisfy anyone who, like Mother Dulcis Maria, prefers to remain “abandoned to whatever death Our Lord should choose to send us.”
The marvelous final depiction of Adele carries echoes of “Sympathy for the Devil:”
Surely she had attended Dionysus in the age of gods and heroes. With her fennel wand in hand, had she not run through the Attic woods with the other frenzied Bacchae, ravenous and orgiastic? …. Had she not drunk tea in London with Madame Blavatsky and ushered in the Age of Aquarius in Haight-Ashbury? Had she not been watching from the covert when lightning fell from the sky?
And, yes, Adele will go on to ply her lethal trade long after Kate leaves this world. But in the end, when Kate doesn’t speak for herself, Veronica’s very good death stands in for hers—just as Veronica’s prayers when she offers up her own death find their efficacy in Kate’s. Like Ferdinand’s father in Ariel’s song, there is “Nothing of [her] that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange.”
For a man who tries to run away from his commission, Benedict proves to be a worthy apprentice. And maybe the “humble editor” pose is a just a rhetorical trick. But then again, who among us has not had a document placed in our hands—an email or text from a friend, or a passage of scripture—only to find it says just what we needed to hear?