“Warning!!! No inspirational life lessons will be found in these pages,” reads a spiky disclaimer on the front cover of “Half Empty,” the last book the humorist David Rakoff published before he died in 2012.
For once, a blurb is not just accurate but modest: “Half Empty” is a classic in the literature of comic pessimism. If you could imagine Ambrose Bierce transported to the West Village at the end of the last century, you would have a sense of Rakoff’s epigrammatically cynical approach.
Rakoff ‘s pessimism was well-earned: He endured a long bout of cancer in his 20s, saw most of his generation of gay men wiped out by AIDS, and succumbed to lymphoma at the age of 47 after undergoing the indignity of having an arm amputated.
Rakoff, who also was a superb actor, had the kind of interesting curriculum vitae accumulated by anyone who has spent decades in New York laboring in the margins of the arts world: He appeared as Sigmund Freud in a department store window display, he was cast (and quickly fired ) as a bitchy queen of indeterminate ethnicity in the film of Olivia Goldsmith’s “The First Wives Club” and he delivered an unforgettable rant in the Academy Award- winning short film “The New Tenants.”
Many eulogists — including David Sedaris, his colleague at National Public Radio — have stressed the kindness and sweetness at the core of Rakoff’s writing, but if you look close enough, you will see that the bitterness soaks all the way through.
“Half Empty” contains a long piece on “The First Wives Club” affair and its aftermath. Goldsmith (who is not named, but Rakoff has not tried too hard to disguise her identity) comes off as a monster who richly deserved her death from plastic surgery, although as far as I can tell, her only crimes were having been a successful writer without talent and having treated the lowly Rakoff with the characteristic thoughtlessness that the wealthy and famous display toward the less fortunate. The essay is, as Rakoff might put it, a smorgasbord of schadenfreude.
“The Uncollected David Rakoff” is a typically uneven mixture of posthumous miscellany: magazine ephemera, unpublished pieces, a few enduring essays, a couple of overlong interviews with Terry Gross and a novella that is unlike anything ever written.
In the essay “Goodbye to All of You,” the writer looks at an important but seldom-examined topic — the “capacity and desire to slough people off.” Is there is an etiquette, or even an ethics, for dropping people you once had a bond with but now have no feeling or use for?
“Life is like a flight. Sometimes you sit beside someone and tell them too much about yourself. Unlike a flight, however, life goes on and on, and you can’t change planes in Grand Rapids, so sometimes you have to change seats.
The novella, “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish,” is a singular accomplishment. Love is a dark multigenerational saga dealing with child abuse, abortion, freak accidents, dementia and AIDS. What makes the novella unique is not its subject matter, which you could find in any John Irving novel, but its form: It is told in rhyming couplets of anapestic tetrameter. In less technical language, that’s how Dr. Seuss wrote.
Here is how Rakoff describes an abortionist’s office:
The doctor’s door must have had five or more locks.
With a sixth to secure Helen’s cash in a box.
Or the relentless progress of AIDS:
Rampant and infections called opportunistic
Worked at a pace both absurd and sadistic.
Narrating unbearable events in a tone that is zany and relentlessly propulsive, Rakoff has, in his sundering of form and content, an existential point to make. The universe, it seems, does not sympathetically darken to acknowledge our heartbrokenness or slow down to let us absorb our bewilderment.
Any bartender will tell you that in order to properly savor bitterness, you need add some sweetness. (And to savor means not just to enjoy, but to contemplate at length.)
In many comic writers who work in the bittersweet vein – the late Nora Ephron, for example — that sweetness comes in the form of unearned redemption. In other words, sentimentality. There are few moments of reprieve in Rakoff’s work. The sweetness originates in the aesthetic pleasure he gives us from the sharpness of his wit, the ingenuity of his rhymes and the cold rightness of his steadily observed insights.
