The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

By David Shields
256 pp. Knopf, 2008 $23.95

Reviewed by Celene Carillo

It’s hard when your readers know that the path on which you’re sending them starts in the womb; emerges into childhood; winds through adolescence and adulthood; and predictably descends into decay and eventual death. “All human beings have bodies.  All bodies are mortal.  Yours is one of those bodies,” David Shields writes in The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead.  What can you give people to look forward to, when they know just where they’re going? 

But Shields attempts this in his latest book, which is one part physiological primer that shows us some of the minutest details of being a person, like how your ability to taste bitter or salty things declines after the age of twenty, or how a woman’s uterus weighs half as much when she’s 65 as it did when she was 30. 

Throughout the book Shields also quotes writers, athletes, philosophers, artists and even his physician on their impressions of youth and adulthood, and of course what they feel about death.    

The Thing About Life is a memoir of Shields’ youth as an athlete and the limitations of middle age.  But more than anything, it’s a chronicle of his indefatigable 96-year-old father, who seems to defy every statistic (and there are many of those). “I seem to have an Oedipal urge to bury him in a shadow of death data,” Shields writes. “I love him and I hate him and I want him to live forever and I want him to die tomorrow.”

The thing about trying to weave all of this into one book is that it doesn’t always work. Shields is a capable writer – he’s engaging when he’s telling his own stories, and his father is a fascinating amalgamation of relentless vigor, manic depression, hyperbole and chronic disapproval. But Shields can get uncomfortably personal, like when he compares his own, average erect penis to his father’s larger one. 

The Thing About Life also suffers from rhythmic issues – although the painstakingly researched statistics Shields gives us are revelatory, they can be overwhelming, largely because Shields often delivers them in an unvarying staccato:  “By the time you’re 5, your head has attained 90 percent of its mature size.  By age 7, your brain reaches 90 percent of its maximum weight,” Shields writes, and so on.  Too often the reader comes to expect, at the end of such description, to hear how Shields’ father defies it all.     

But The Thing About Life is resonant when Shields hits his stride, and he does, perhaps unsurprisingly when the subject is mortality.  It’s easier to see into Shields, and especially his father, when the older man’s vitality cracks and exposes vulnerability.  “The next morning, when I arrived 15 minutes late to take him out to brunch, he was sobbing.  Fearful that I’d perished in an auto accident, he’d called my hotel, 911, and even Laurie back in Seattle to see if she’d heard anything about my whereabouts,” Shields writes.  Scenes like this are heartbreaking and gorgeous, and finally bring all of Shields’ elements together, no matter how predictable the end may be.