MEMOIR: KATIE DONOVANreviews [sic]: A MemoirBy Joshua Cody Bloomsbury, 266pp. £16.99
THE SEASICK SENSATION of tipping over into a zone where you have no control, where doctors start to tell you things and your brain flips out, grasps for connections elsewhere – anywhere. [sic], Joshua Cody's memoir, sets out to "put a frame around" his experience of cancer yet captures with raw intimacy the spiralling of the addled consciousness of the cancer patient whose illness is not responding to treatment.
Incorporating cinema critiques, dreams, biographical snatches from the lives of his favourite poets, and extracts from his mother's notebook, the book is a pastiche of the formula of the misery memoir we have come to expect since Angela's Asheshit the scene, in 1996. Yet in essence it follows the same path: that of a survivor who battles his way through gruelling odds. (Just beware pages 106-121, where Cody lulls the unsuspecting reader into believing he isn't really Joshua Cody from Milwaukee who is studying music in New York but a pre-first World War denizen of Budapest attending the Liszt Academy. Blame the morphine.)
Cody is a savvy thirtysomething man about Manhattan, as well as an intellectual and a composer. Between flighty sex scenes and witty one-liners ("being sick is very much a full time job"), there are enlightening ruminations about music from Mozart to Mick Jagger. There are long magisterial sentences replete with a tapestry of connections from architecture, history and happenstance that smack of WG Sebald in Austerlitz. (Also taking a leaf out of Austerlitz, there are reproductions of black-and-white photographs; I suspect in Cody's case, however, these are employed to take up space, as the book is rather slight – Cody himself refers to what he is writing as an essay). One of the best of these long sentences sums up the things that he loves about being alive, and it incorporates a lovely pen portrait of the generous and modest Louis Armstrong.
Some of the writing can be searing: “a dark pain that began in the lower back and radiated in crippling pulses up the spine and out”. Yet there are interludes of languor, when we hear yet again about Ezra Pound (with whose genius and mental breakdown Cody is obsessed) and about his father, the late Cody snr (with whose failed writing career Cody is obsessed), in vignettes and digressions that are repetitive and irritatingly incidental.
But to get back to Cody’s story, he is diagnosed with a malignant tumour on his neck while completing his PhD at Columbia University. Chemo (six months of it) is unsuccessful, and Cody makes a risky choice: a combination of high-dose chemotherapy, full-body radiation and an autologous bone-marrow transplant.
He distracts himself with surreal relationships. One woman, Carmilla, a cancer and double-mastectomy survivor, has had a bust made of her breasts to remind herself of what she has lost; another is a professional dominatrix. His affair with “Nothereal” (a play on “not her real name”), has to be the most neurotic. She is on his medical team and is responsible for his nearly having a nervous breakdown the night before he is to learn whether his treatment has been successful. Convinced that the reason she has suddenly broken up with him is because she has learned he is going to die, he goes back to his apartment, where he smashes everything in the place and nearly slits his throat.
Although his parenthetical observations can be interesting, there are just too many. More often the most powerful writing is when he steels himself to recall what happened, such as his description of the bone-marrow transplant followed by his near death, or his yearning after love (“the sheer hurtling forth, the leap . . . ”). Or the opening, laced with black humour, where he aptly compares the chemo room with an airport gate or a nail salon: “At first I took the complacent cheeriness as an effort on the part of the staff to mask the dread, but after a few sessions I discovered there was in fact no artifice here, nothing feigned: that it was, for them, about as earth-shattering as a trip to the dry-cleaners.”
When at last he is out of danger, he rediscovers the bliss of banality. As he leaves the hospital in his mother’s car, his first words are: “I love traffic.” To be outside the intense frame of cancer – to be merely quotidian – is the luxury of those who know they have plenty of time.
Katie Donovan is a poet. Her most recent book is Rootling: New and Selected Poems(Bloodaxe Books, 2010). She teaches creative writing at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
