A Book of Reasons

In The Age of Grief the writer Jane Smiley refers to that moment when "the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down." A similar dawning pervades John Vernon's autobiographical A Book of Reasons. When his older brother Paul dies of an aneurysm, Vernon finds himself saddled with the responsibility of his sibling's estate. He must rehabilitate a house crammed with refuse and the sickening stench of dead pets and their sickening stench, as he tries to comprehend how Paul's life devolved into dilapidation. Vernon quests for reasons: how could a man perceived as an eccentric sociopath at most, fall to a state that could only be described as animalistic? Though the book's time frame is the three-month period between Paul's death and the dissolution of his estate, the author manages an exhumation of some 40-odd years in a struggle to reconstruct their lives together and apart. As the author contends with his grief and the practical aspects of the house's cleanup, he finds a coping mechanism: a consideration of items and commonplace occurrences. Buying a thermometer at Wal-Mart conjures a lengthy discourse on the history of temperature measurement. The purchase of equipment needed to build a simple set of stairs fuels a meditation on tools and how their evolution paralleled that of man and animals. Vernon reaches back through the ages to expound on how the contributions of Galileo, Pascal, Robert Fludd and many others shaped our understanding of how the present world came to be. The reader is treated to various insights ranging from how rocks were employed as hammers by Homo sapiens, to the murder of Abel by Cain with a weapon, or "tools that got to be weapons by being misused." It's a seesaw, really: over here, the life of Paul alongside the author's guilt, incredulity and dormant memory; over there, a timeless world with its theories, speculations and advances. Both carry a long circuitous chain of reasons or "recipes for making sense of the world's arrangements and accidents." The bulk of the work is unapologetically nonlinear, containing a larger ratio of science to actual memoir. Yet the author's brother is always there, haunting either a discourse on the history of internment or the origin of central heating back in 80 B.C. For readers who prefer straightforward memoir, these flights may prove a distraction from what is essentially a compelling look at sibling estrangement. But these technical flights never feel clinical or even detached. Vernon's wounded, probing voice holds it together nicely, whether the subject is the Big Bang, or the circumstances that led to the appearance of nine-year-old Paul's photo on the front page of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. In melding science to the personal, he illuminates a universe that's become as vague to us as his brother was to him, while reminding us that context is everything. At one point Vernon says that he somehow fell

The cover illustration of one of Joseph Cornell's cryptic boxes, assembled from discarded junk, is an excellent visual metaphor for the way in which John Vernon approaches the topic of death, loss and an exploration of the reasons for living in this book. Vernon attempts to make sense, not so much of the death, but of the peculiar, eclectic life of his older brother. The binding threads among the disparate elements of Vernon's university career, his role as executor of his brother's estate, the brother's gradual withdrawal from social relationships and the junkpile life that he leaves behind, are brief excerpts from an old encyclopedia that describe the tools and techniques of empirical culture. Vernon profoundly explores the microcosm of American family and lifestyle in his examination of the microcosm of his brother's life and their disconnected and blundered relationship. From the opening pages of his excursion to the local Walmart to find a thermometer to mount on his recently dead brother's house, Vernon is adept at using his own frustration and experiences of cultural clutter as the divining rod to unravel the peculiarities of brother's secluded and repulsively littered life. Vernon uses metaphors like the thermometer throughout the text to observe and measure his own as well as our cultural climate and the ways in which we collect and treat objects and relationships in our supposedly educated and modern American culture. Vernon employs a masterful mix of humor, angst, revulsion, annoyance and fascinated curiousity in his exploration of grieving as a means to examine the many-layered questions of life and death. It is a refreshing exploration that avoids the usual religious and spiritual overtones of the subject, yet retains a profound metaphysical inquiry about self, other and culture that presses the reader to frame (and reframe) his/her own perspective and practices. Vernon uses metaphor and object representation as tools to explore the essential questions and impacts of life and lifestyle. If there is one flaw in this fascinating and engaging book it is the ending, which slips into a conventional approach that pushes the reader to accept the notion that no life is a waste. When Vernon takes us into mundane territory in such an unconventional way it is a bit disappointing that he ends on such a conventional note.

The story of how the author deals with the remains of his brother's house and life is harrowing and deeply human, and the history behind all the objects in our lives is fascinating. The author brings these elements together with a deftness that is astonishing, and with a combination of solid knowledge, wry self-awareness, and delicate touch that is both comforting and uplifting. Reading A Book of Reasons is a moving, intellectually stimulating, and gratifying experience.

_A Book of Reasons_ is the strongest memoir I have read since Tobias Wolff's _This Boy's Life_. Interspersed with Vernon's accounts of visits to his brother's abandoned, ruined house are fascinating historical interludes detailing the invention of objects such as the thermometer and the claw hammer. Toward the end of the book, Vernon gracefully alternates between descriptions of the Big Bang and his brother Paul's conception, which occurred several years prior to the author's. As a historical novelist, of course, this is Vernon's great strength -- an uncanny ability to make us believe he has witnessed not only those events which followed his birth, but those which came before.The sections of the book in which Vernon describes coming face-to-face with the mess of Paul's house are extremely moving. It will be an overhwelming chore to clean the place up, and this becomes very clear to Vernon as he recounts the situation to his wife over the phone and suddenly bursts into tears. He is a warm, engaging, funny, and compassionate narrator, and it is utterly impossible to put the book down as we follow him through the process of enlisting a cleaning crew, and, finally, watching them get to work.In many ways, this is a book about shame -- the shame of not keeping one's house clean, the shame of disconnection between family members, the shame we must all face when claiming we are more together than others, cleaner than others, better socialized. Gently, intelligently, and with great style, Vernon reminds us of our place in history, and of how we are all connected.