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Cancer memoir full of life
By Gregory Cowles |
November 11, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
EARLY in Joshua Cody's sprightly, manic cancer memoir, "(Sic)," the author pauses to explain the musical significance of the "golden ratio" - the moment, almost two-thirds of the way through a composition, when the work often "asserts its presence and opens up to take you in and it feels like the pilot has moved the throttle and you feel motion again."
Curious readers may take this as a cue to flip ahead to Page 164, which is where (according to the Euclidean formula Cody graciously provides) the golden ratio falls in his own narrative. There they will find Cody on the verge of death, joined at his hospital bedside by his mother and the emotionally unstable pain management doctor who is about to become, disastrously, his girlfriend. They will find, in other words, the throttle shoved all the way forward. The resulting G-force of sex and death and insanity - and also of music and math and poetry - is the only evidence you need that for all its seeming formlessness, "(Sic)" is as artfully constructed as a Tarantino film.
Or, more to the point maybe, a Debussy orchestral work. Cody is a young composer who was pursuing a PhD at Columbia when he discovered the tumor that haunts every sentence of this memoir, and he can be so casually smart about music that I wish the book came embedded with MP3s in addition to its photos and paintings and scrap-paper notes. Here he is on the process of composition: "Writing music isn't really writing, it's designing." His one-sentence synopsis of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" runs for a full two pages, swinging from song to song in a masterpiece of free association and compressed criticism, as in this apt summary of the album's fifth track, "Fixing a Hole": "the joy of letting meandering thoughts meander, reasonless, for the sole sake of joy."
As it happens, that's not a bad description of "(Sic)" either.
Life, of course, is always the point in a cancer memoir, and to judge from "(Sic)," Cody's has been livelier than most. "(Sic)" isn't an exceedingly introspective memoir; Cody seems far more curious about the world than about himself. He's good, in his way, at telling you what happened, but not at analyzing it.
Cancer memoirs pose singular hazards for authors and reviewers: for the author, there's the threat of maudlin sentimentality, and for the reviewer, the question of how to criticize someone's pain and suffering. Cody sidesteps the sentimentality issue by mocking it. "Pale pastel book after book," he says of the memoirs he read when he first fell ill, "each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe."
It's true that, like those memoirists, Cody also received a diagnosis and a book deal, but there's nothing pastel about "(Sic)," and nobody needed to teach him how beautiful life is.
Curious readers may take this as a cue to flip ahead to Page 164, which is where (according to the Euclidean formula Cody graciously provides) the golden ratio falls in his own narrative. There they will find Cody on the verge of death, joined at his hospital bedside by his mother and the emotionally unstable pain management doctor who is about to become, disastrously, his girlfriend. They will find, in other words, the throttle shoved all the way forward. The resulting G-force of sex and death and insanity - and also of music and math and poetry - is the only evidence you need that for all its seeming formlessness, "(Sic)" is as artfully constructed as a Tarantino film.
Or, more to the point maybe, a Debussy orchestral work. Cody is a young composer who was pursuing a PhD at Columbia when he discovered the tumor that haunts every sentence of this memoir, and he can be so casually smart about music that I wish the book came embedded with MP3s in addition to its photos and paintings and scrap-paper notes. Here he is on the process of composition: "Writing music isn't really writing, it's designing." His one-sentence synopsis of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" runs for a full two pages, swinging from song to song in a masterpiece of free association and compressed criticism, as in this apt summary of the album's fifth track, "Fixing a Hole": "the joy of letting meandering thoughts meander, reasonless, for the sole sake of joy."
As it happens, that's not a bad description of "(Sic)" either.
Life, of course, is always the point in a cancer memoir, and to judge from "(Sic)," Cody's has been livelier than most. "(Sic)" isn't an exceedingly introspective memoir; Cody seems far more curious about the world than about himself. He's good, in his way, at telling you what happened, but not at analyzing it.
Cancer memoirs pose singular hazards for authors and reviewers: for the author, there's the threat of maudlin sentimentality, and for the reviewer, the question of how to criticize someone's pain and suffering. Cody sidesteps the sentimentality issue by mocking it. "Pale pastel book after book," he says of the memoirs he read when he first fell ill, "each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe."
It's true that, like those memoirists, Cody also received a diagnosis and a book deal, but there's nothing pastel about "(Sic)," and nobody needed to teach him how beautiful life is.
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