Coping With Death, Possessing a Life

The Letter Left to Me

By Joseph McElroy

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

$ 16.95

THE theme of children dealing with a parent's death is timeless in literature, but in danger of being rendered trite through overuse. In The Letter Left to Me, Joseph McElroy avoids cliches by developing this theme in a unique and effective manner. The novel centers on letter from a father, written a few years before his death, to his teen-aged son. McElroy's choice of plot saves his novel from becoming another repetitive reflection on dealing with death.

Ownership becomes one of the most important concepts in the novel as it traces the course of the letter's dissemination. The letter becomes truly a letter left "to me," instead of "for me," as control over it passes from the protagonist's hands. When the book opens, the boy's mother has just handed the boy the letter, and immediately he is caught up in its contents and its history.

His reflections on the letter become the jumping off point for the liberal rush of free association that follows. We follow the boy's thought process as he tries to reconcile his views of his father with those of his friends and family. We sense his uncertainty when, suddenly, the letter passes out of his control, and is copied and sent to numerous relatives and friends of the family. Each of these has some comment to make on the letter that the boy feels was meant only for him. Uncertain how this development occurred, the boy watches passively, unhappy but somehow unable to halt the flow of events.

McElroy shows the boy's vacillations about the sending of the letter with credibility and sensitivity. Although the boy attempts to be understanding about his mother's and grandparents' decision to share the document, he is never certain what gives his family the right to examine and discuss this relic of his father's that he feeels was meant to speak directly to him.

Because it is the only meaningful talisman remaining to him after his father's death, every detail of its history becomes sacred. He constantly tries to recreate the letter's origins, to determine whether his mother knew about its existence before he found her with it, and to trace its journey from the safe where it was first kept to the desk drawer where it was after his father's death. He says, "I did not see my mother actually find the letter. Come across it; locate it. I'm building backwards again." Toward the end of the novel, the boy has begun to assimilate his varying pictures of his father, but he is still fixated on the letter itself.

"Was the letter written to me? What about that? (Passed to me in my sleep, a neglected dream, or it made too much sense, or made too much of me.) Safely deposited in a bank. Withdrawn to a drawer of the excellent desk in the living room exactly when?"

MCELROY writes in a first-person stream of consciousness that draws in the reader, seeming to replicate the confused and wandering form that a child's thoughts might plausibly take after a parent's death. At times the style grows annnoyingly Salinger-esque, and is peppered with italics and occasional self-conscious introspection: "And I said, `My father passed away last night.' I who of all people know enough to say 'died': yet said `passed away."' But for the most part the flow of free association is effective.

As the boy changes his way of adapting to death, McElroy shifts the tone of the novel. The first chapters are a monologue, mirroring the isolation and entrapment that the protagonist feels. Later, McElroy inserts dialogue into the text, a change that reflects the boy's attempts to adjust to his father's death and to the dissemination of the letter.

The boy begins to shift his focus away from ownership of the letter, and he begins to directly confront his own relationship with his father. Part of him wishes to see it as a work of love: "If the letter is attention given to me, sending it out in all these copies is proof, or is giving my attention to those on the list," he says, trying to rationalize his mother's decision to share the letter.

But even as he reads it, and rereads it, searching for tidbits of love or caring, there are shreds of doubt in his mind. His memory betrays him, and his image of his father becomes confused with that of those around him. His fears are nearly realized at the end of the novel, when an acquaintance blankly tells him, "`It's not an affectionate letter.'"

Another part of the boy is tempted to view the letter as do his friends and relatives. They see it as a work of art as well as proof of love, and toss out comments like, "'Your father wrote extremely well,'" or "'You couldn't have had a better father.'" But the son of the writer is not content with this interpretation. His father becomes "the writer of the letter" rather than "his father."

The son continues to struggle to establish a consistent identity for his father, and seems to regret the fame that the letter has brought to him after death. He says, "I see that that is what I want this afternoon magnetized by the mail, detoured around class, food, new people, that he be a mere inhabitant of earth." In death, his father has become a symbol that transcends his son's memories.

BUT as the boy comes closer to understanding his father, he draws closer to his other family members as well. His mother is a constant but reticent presence throughout the book. Her character is sadly underdveloped, but the boy hints at the influence she has in his life, and at the important role that he, an only child, plays in hers.

At the same time, however, the letter becomes a wall separating the boy from his mother. It is a gift that has been given him to unravel, and McElroy suggests that the boy cannot freely interact with others until he unravels the letter's past as well as its future.

The novel is an enveloping glimpse into the soul of a teenaged boy baffled by the effects of death on his mind and world. McElroy's drifting, almost careless stream of consciousness adds credence to his hero's words. The reader is drawn into the boy's mind, and follows his leaps from bemusement to reminiscence to stark realization of death's actuality. What began as an elegy for the father develops into a journal documenting the son's progression into maturity even as the letter progresses into wider and wider circles of society.

McElroy's achievement is to move beyond elegy, which is the conventiopnal stance of books about the death of loved ones. Just as the letter ends up by cerating a distance between the boy and his father, as written words are want to do, so too an elegaic novel would only add to that distance.

The boy must come to terms with his father, and himself; he must, in short, learn to grow up, a process which lies at the heart of any father-son relationship. That process, perhaps more painful and certainly less conventionally eloquent than simple elegy, enables one to cope with the death of a parent, McElroy suggests. It also forms the basis for a well-crafted and instructive novel.