The Disintegrations

by Alistair McCartney

Overview

Detached from life in Los Angeles and his past in Australia, uncomfortable around other humans, the narrator of this inventive autobiographical novel researches death on the Internet; mulls over distant and intimate stories of suicides, serial killers, and "natural deaths"; and wanders about LA's Holy Cross Cemetery. Wry yet somber, astringent yet tender, The Disintegrations confronts both the impossibility of understanding death and the timeless longing for immortality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299314705
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	08/22/2017
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Alistair McCartney is the author of The End of the World Book, a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Fiction. He teaches creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

The Weight
Holy Cross Cemetery
My Grandma’s Resurrection
Holy Cross Cemetery, Part Two
The Cycle of Experience
Robert
The Dead Man’s Things
Orientation
Mike Hazelwood and the Floor of the Dead
The California Section
A Tour
The Birnies
Brushes with Death
Demographics
Heidi’s Book
Notable Persons
The Mourners
The Dancing Corpse of Jill Yip
A Hole in the World
Disintegration
Erin’s Trip
Regulations
The University of Disintegration
Chris, a Recipe
My Coffin
The Caretaker’s Wife
Cooper’s Story
A Hole in the Ground
Odors
Aino’s Song
How to Dispose of Me
The Mourner
Eun Kang and the Ocean
Death Dream #1
Data
My Grandfather’s Hemorrhage
Immortality
An Encounter
The Ballad of Sandra Golvin
A Death Book
The Hearses
 
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

06/19/2017
Death, a force that McCartney (The End of the World Book) labels “the great disintegrator, the gnarly unmaker,” is examined in this cerebral autobiographical novel. An Australian professor in Los Angeles, McCartney writes of the obsessive visits to a cemetery he makes in hopes that proximity to death will help him understand “that subject whose contemplation separates us from all the other clawed and declawed animals.” He looks to the deaths of those whose lives intersected with his own for clues. These case studies range widely, from a nephew killed a week after his birth by “blue baby syndrome” to four women who were “abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered” by his childhood neighbors in Perth. With every example, death mutates in McCartney’s telling from a subject whose study gives him “purpose, a sense of direction” to a source of real terror. In addition to charting McCartney’s growing fear of the topic that fascinates him, the novel offers plenty of provocative images, as when he notes that a “cemetery is a space made of holes” or remembers that his grandfather insisted his “watch be wound by the mortician right before the coffin lid was closed.” McCartney’s enquiry offers few definitive answers, but the change it forces in him is palpable. “Let me speak candidly,” he concludes in his measured, disquieting tone. “I would welcome the opportunity to experiment with immortality.” (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"A book that takes possession of you right from the opening and will not let you go. Challenging and gripping, a rumination on death and memory that speaks eloquently to our sense of loss, both personal and communal. The writing is exquisite. In the best possible sense, I know this book will haunt me for the longest time." —Christos Tsiolkas, author of Barracuda


"Engrossing and reverent, The Disintegrations strangles death. A philosophy of the concrete and a reckoning of the ethereal, this novel dreams of all that has become lost in a world of remainders. We who remain may not find relief, but it leaves us dazzled and astonished and brutally satisfied with a gratitude for living." —Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary


"An uncanny and mesmerizing study of the dread and terror in contemplating death as both remembrance and disappearance, and an intimate reveal of how our fears of erasure are a ghostly double for our awe at being alive." —Manuel Muñoz, author of What You See in the Dark


"An awe-inspiring tour de force, a circuitous thanatopsis, a maze that constantly reiterates its structure until everything it contains is subsumed within a new ulterior obfuscation. McCartney not only shows us that death is a language unto itself but also provides us with a dictionary with which to parse it." —Mark Gluth, author of No Other


"In this long-awaited second novel, a narrator's fascination with the geography of a nearby cemetery becomes a map of the losses and disappearances that have defined his own life. As he sorts through half-memories of deaths both notorious and obscure, a c

From the Publisher

2017-06-20
A novel that reads like a journal—with all entries meditations on the theme of death.If readers approach this book with conventional expectations (e.g., exposition, complication, climax, denouement), they will be disappointed, for McCartney (The End of the World Book, 2008) forgoes all these elements of fiction. Instead, the narrator—whose voice is impossible to distinguish from that of the author—offers us thoughts on death, dying, corpses, coffins, grave robbers, hearses, cemeteries, and much more. The setting that serves as the locus of "action" here is Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles, the final resting place (as the narrator informs us) of Rita Hayworth, Sharon Tate, Lawrence Welk, and Jimmy Durante, and surely a group as disparate as this shows us death as the great equalizer. We also learn about mass murderers such as the Birnies, a couple who over a period of two months in 1986 "abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered four young women" in Australia, where the author grew up. In fact, he (or the narrator) claims to have met them once. The narrative that unfolds here is obviously grim, but the arcana can be undeniably fascinating. (One is tempted to insert "alas" here.) For example, among other lessons, we learn about the "odors" of death. The narrator admits to being obsessed by his subject. As he states, "I'm the world's worst listener, except when the subject is death and my ears prick up." And he's not concerned solely with the material world—metaphysical speculations enter into his thoughts as well: "when it comes to death, God is at his most imaginative; death is where he gets creative." Outré and disturbingly engaging.

Kirkus Reviews