The American Way of Writing About Death

Thomas Lynch is a quintessentially American hyphenate -- a person whose life work cannot be summed up in a single word. As Jennifer Lopez is a singer hyphen actor, Mr. Lynch is a poet hyphen undertaker.

He admits right off the bat that all poets are worried about is sex and death. Since his profession brings him much closer than most to the latter, he has a somewhat different view than your run-of-the-mill poet hyphen English professor. The same goes for his prose, which is what this particular book is (his poetry can be found in Skating With Heather Grace and Grimalkin & Other Poems).

Lynch has a marvelous eye for both the grotesque and the beautiful, and he never falls into the trap of soliloquizing about how beautiful is something that's actually grotesque -- sorry, no elegies of the true wonder of an infected lung here.

The stories, twelve in all, mostly deal with the author's undertakings. A couple veer into the life of a poet, but that can be forgiven. Each is a gem, a frozen series of events that exist outside all of the others, offering us just a quick look behind a half-open door marked GROTESQUE before the narrator steps in front of us and closes the door as he asks, "There's nothing beautiful there. Trust me. Let's look over here at something that is beautiful." And the flowers he shows us are all the prettier for our having caught a glimpse of what is behind that door.

Lynch is a marvelous writer, and you probably won't find this book in a Barnes & Noble endcap with a card saying, "If you like Patricia Cornwell, you'll love The Undertaking!" But it's worth the look, and it's worth spending a few minutes on the couch with someone you love, reading one story at a time, letting it linger before plunging into the open grave of the next.