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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books -- Review / Books: The Long Road to the End

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THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD

By David Shields

(Knopf, 225 pages, $23.95)

"THIS IS my research; this is what I now know," David Shields writes in his prologue: "the brute facts of existence, the fragility and ephemerality of life in its naked corporeality, human beings as bare, forked animals, the beauty and pathos in my body . . . and everyone else's body as well."

Points worth remembering, sure, but research? Fortunately, Mr. Shields undersells himself. The author of previous works of fiction and nonfiction, he has written a death book that resists pigeonholing. (Only on the bookshelf does death achieve tidiness.) This isn't an account of the author's dying or grieving, or a memoir of a professional to whom death is routine, or a guidebook to the mythic "good death." Instead, Mr. Shields offers a more panoramic version of Sherwin Nuland's "How We Die," replete with tidbits that are provocative and, for the middle-aged, often disheartening, covering the whole life cycle -- which is to say, the death cycle.

Coordination and strength peak at 19, IQ at around 20, bone mass at 30, Mr. Shields reports. On the down slope, the brain shrinks, the eyes go cloudy, the metabolic rate falls. You slow down, you break down. If you reach 100, odds are nine out of 10 that you're female -- testosterone makes life and then takes it. More of longevity's secrets: "People with higher education live six years longer than high school dropouts; Oscar winners outlive unsuccessful nominees by four years; CEOs outlive corporate vice presidents; religious people outlive atheists; tall people (men over 6'; women over 5'7") outlive short people by three years; . . . American immigrants live three years longer than natives." Laurie, Mr. Shields's wife, quotes a friend -- "At 40, a woman must choose between her face and her ass: nice ass, gaunt face; good face, fat ass." Laurie's choice.

In amiably meandering chapters, Mr. Shields intersperses descriptions of the rise and fall of the typical human with dispatches regarding the trajectory of a particular human: himself. "I once felt animal joy in being alive and I felt this mainly when I was playing basketball and I only occasionally feel that animal joy anymore and that's life," he says. Like the onetime basketball hero of John Updike's Rabbit novels, Mr. Shields now must seek pleasure elsewhere. "Today was a disaster, I tell myself at least twice a week, stopping at a cafe that makes the most perfect Rice Krispies Treats, but this tastes delicious."

The sugar jolt passes, but not Mr. Shields's obsession with his father. "I want to know: What is it like inside his skin?" Milton Shields (formerly Shildcrout) looms large over book and son alike. He was born in 1910 and, at least when the author finished writing, is still alive. The father is an exercise junkie, a ham whose anecdotes aren't always tethered to truth and, like Mr. Shields, a sports fanatic. But block that stereotype: Shields the elder is also a manic- depressive who has undergone electroshock therapy, has never held a job for long and, perhaps no coincidence, has some less-than-suave moments. When a woman from the senior-citizens center rebuffs his overtures and says she wants to remain friends, the horny, hoary father bellows: "If I wanted a friend, I would have bought a dog." Or so he claims.

Whereas the late-90s father is mostly untroubled by thoughts of dying, they haunt the early-50s Mr. Shields. His shaved scalp represents "an acknowledgment of death rather than a denial of death (as, to take an extreme example, the comb-over is)." Plagued by a bad back, among other reminders of mortality, he describes his accessorizing: "I go to sleep with a night guard jammed between my teeth and a Breathe Right strip stretched across my nose (to mitigate snoring), and a pillow between my legs. I walk around with an ice pack stuck in one coat pocket and a baggie of ibuprofen in the other. I'm not exactly the king of the jungle."

In addition to its other attractions, "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead" is a sort of death-centric Bartlett's, although on this score the results are mixed. Some of the quotations, such as James Thurber's deathbed "God bless. God damn" are impeccably self-contained, but others cry out for commentary, or at least some refereeing, as when Cicero, Victor Hugo, Joseph Conrad, Don Marquis and Virginia Woolf all jostle for attention on one page. Although Mr. Shields personalizes many a biological fact -- he suffered from such catastrophic acne as an adolescent, he says, that his air-brushed senior yearbook photo prompted people to ask who it was -- he slips offstage during many of the quotefests.

There's someone else offstage, too: Mr. Shields's mother, who died of lung cancer at 51, long after the end of her rancorous marriage to the author's father. Mr. Shields quotes an entry from her diary and the instructions in her will for the disposal of her body, both of the passages cool-headed and warm-hearted. "Although I do not want a religious memorial service," she said in the will, "I hope it is helpful to family and friends to have an informal gathering of people, so that each may draw strength from one another." That's about it. Did Mr. Shields, who was in his early 20s when his mother died, decide to write the book as he neared her age at death? Is the wound still too deep? Was she a peripheral figure in his life? He doesn't say.

In a sense, these gaps pay tribute to the book. Mr. Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer. Approaching the flatline of the last page, we want more.

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Mr. Bates teaches in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.