The critic who parses the artist parsing death must be every inch as intrepid as the artist himself. In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe delivers a composite of daring beauty on the deaths of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak, a necessary report from 'the deepening shades,' as Yeats has it, rife with her hospitable authority and critical rectitude...Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant vigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper.
To spend a few hours in the company of a narrator like Kalanithi, such an urgent, pulsing presence on the page, you can hardly believe he is gone ... Like any memoir of terminal illness, it is saturated with the author’s awareness that this is it, his last chance to make himself known to those he loves and those who will only ever experience him on the page ... Kalanithi makes his narrative of development fresh for readers of all backgrounds, in part by recounting discoveries of the philosophical complexities woven into the practice of medicine ... Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, Paul’s widow, has contributed a devastating epilogue to When Breath Becomes Air ... When Breath Becomes Air does what all great literature does: it allows a man whose life belongs to the past to endure.
The intimacy and precision of Ms. Roiphe’s accounts, which move fluidly back and forth in time, are so remarkable that one wonders how she could possibly know so much about these private events, even with the benefit of, say, Mark Edmundson’s book on Freud’s death or Mr. Rieff’s on that of his mother. As if on demand, the author provides an afterword on sourcing that makes clear the years of interviews and reading she poured into this work.
The intensity of these passages — the depth of research, the acute sensitivity for declarative moments — is deeply beguiling. 'The rich excitement of dusk,' Roiphe writes in an afterword on her research method, which involved long, rambling conversations with the surviving witnesses to her cast’s final months. She’s especially good at viewing a death through the lens of a life’s work...This is a beautiful book, absolutely, but perhaps not quite as fearless as its author might have hoped.
Roiphe makes no judgments about the choices made by these writers and that is one of the book’s many virtues. She is willing to report the truth as her subjects experienced and expressed it. She admits that she questioned her own motives at times, but readers will not: This is a beautiful and thoughtful book.
Those who think of Roiphe as one of the most dazzling writers around (I am one) will perhaps be surprised to find such a deficiency in her – and by the way she seems to acknowledge it. The Violet Hour is written in short paragraphs that float in white space. Sometimes, this lends them a lyrical, meditative, even prayerful quality. At others, the reader has the sense that for all her reading, their author remains uncertain, floundering, unable wholly to marshal her thoughts ... Roife’s passion for these writers – the clue is the word 'great' in her subtitle – means that she loses her distance...The Violet Hour often reads like a book about gods and their willing handmaidens ... Her writing is elegant, cool, unforgettable.
Death is an excellent subject for Ms. Roiphe, who delights in exploring subjects that upset us. A psychoanalyst might say that her interest in this topic is also overdetermined: As a child, she had a pneumonia so dangerous and acute the doctors removed half of one of her lungs. My only objection to her book is that it does not precisely deliver on what it promises: a look at writers in their last throes. Ms. Roiphe is, in her heart, a critic, with sensibilities heavily inflected by the work of Freud. Which means these essays, at their finest, are often literary analyses.
The subtle brilliance of this 'meditation on mortality,' which borrows its title from Eliot's The Waste Land, is its overarching conceit...Through research, interviews and a healthy dose of her own interpretative reading, Roiphe paints a series of revealing and intimate portraits of her subjects while pursuing her own very personal search for answers.
The Violet Hour doesn’t really make an argument about ways to die...Instead, the book is a series of impressions and observations, sometimes gossipy, sometimes gently ruminative. She doesn’t even proceed chronologically from diagnosis to last breath. Indeed her stories dart all over the place, from the writers’ childhoods to the present. Except for some puzzling tense shifts, the episodic structure makes sense; if there is an overarching theme in The Violet Hour, it’s that death never comes in a straight line, no matter how hard the writers try to exit with a 'graceful bravura.'
[Roiphe's] goal was to write about the deaths of 'writers and artists who are especially sensitive or attuned to death.' The result is a beautiful and provocative meditation on mortality.
Shadowing Roiphe’s book is a tentative desire to find something consolatory – a truth, a meaning – in death. Can writers teach us how to die? The uncertain, provisional nature of her project is evident. Instead of a continuous narrative, she writes in discrete floating paragraphs, as if conducting a philosophical investigation. Either that, or she doesn’t quite know how to structure her argument ... The Violet Hour does, however, rally at the end ... This book is Roiphe’s haunting but muddled attempt to come to terms with the mystery of extinction.
Roiphe has thoroughly sifted the coming of death, and the result is fine and weighty...The Violet Hour is wonderfully rangy, an easy-handed association of the protagonists’ being in and then exiting the world. There is nothing tidy about it, much like Thomas’s bed, messy as life. And there isn’t enough of it, like any final conversation.
In an epilogue that is interrupted by James Salter’s unexpected death, the great writer compels Roiphe to 'absolute clarity' with regard to her subject. There will be readers of The Violet Hour who come to it for this clarity, and they will get it, like a deathbed painkiller, in doses. Writing dying, it seems, is always a work in progress: each chapter of the book is fronted with an image of its writer’s desk. It ends with Roiphe’s own.
Readers are apt to find more emotional sustenance in searing first-person accounts of impending death like Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air. Although The Violet Hour is unlikely to move you to tears, it sure offers plenty of thought-provoking psycho-literary analysis and intimate biographical details to satisfy your morbid curiosity.
