If you're looking out for it, death is hidden everywhere in books. Even in works that don't feature a grandiloquent deathbed scene, even in some beloved children's books—you can't escape it. (Babar begins with a murder, and the Winnie-the-Pooh books feel like mortality is always crouching somewhere in wait.) And that's one of the main problems with The Inevitable, a new essay anthology coedited by local author David Shields: It's a book drenched in death, from the first page to the last. But, really, aren't they all?
In the subtitle, Contemporary Writers Confront Death, The Inevitable literally promises a confrontation with the grim reaper. You can't get much more bold than that; it's practically a myth already. It begins with an essay by David Gates describing the sudden, painful death of his father, a 94-year- old man who was vital one day and dying the next. It's not a glamorous death, and Gates is thankfully matter-of-fact about the endless drips of morphine, the pointless changing from one bed to another, the struggle to maintain hygiene on a body that is giving up life, and the unbearable wait for a horrible event that eventually transforms from something you dread into a merciful gift by the time it actually happens.
And perhaps one such essay would be a worthy addition to a book about death. But about half of this book is made up of personal essays about death that comes to the author's loved one—mother, ex-husband, wife. Not to belittle the grief of any of these contributors (there was a me from before my father's death two years ago and there is a me from after my father's death, and most days they feel like completely different people), but to write directly about the death of a loved one is usually about as interesting as writing about your own dreams. The pain is too great and too personal to transform into a relatable experience for readers in a few pages of creative nonfiction. Twenty or thirty pages just isn't enough.
Don't mistake this for a hyperbolic claim that memoir about death is impossible. Joan Didion's essential The Year of Magical Thinking, about the sudden death of her husband, required the extra space and the weight, the bookness of a book to hypnotize her readers into sitting shivah with her. And Joyce Carol Oates's new book about the death of her husband, A Widow's Story, looks to be another book that grabs the reader and forces them into a simulated state of grief for a man they never knew. But the excerpt from Oates's book in The Inevitable feels abrupt, violent in its sadness, like witnessing a car crash between strangers.
Too much of The Inevitable is choked with narrative about the unnarratable (who could have predicted that after Shields's last book, Reality Hunger—supposedly about the death of narrative—his next book would be too heavy with stodgy narratives about death?). The pieces that take a more indirect approach to death are much more successful. Jonathan Safran Foer devises a glossary of the words that are never spoken about death in his family ( , for example, is a "silence mark," which "signifies an absence of language," as when Foer's father tries to explain how much he loves his son on the morning of an angioplasty). Sallie Tisdale contributes a straight-faced lecture on the history and biology of flies, with an anecdotal emphasis on the biosphere of a corpse. "The meat on which the maggots feed begins to liquefy and runs like melting butter... If the maggots fail to move in time, they drown in the broth of the corpse they are eating." Even in death, there is death.
"A dazzling hinterland where myth and history fuse," writes Sara Wheeler early in her new book, The Magnetic North. She's writing about the Arctic, but she could just as easily be talking about death. The frozen north, it turns out, is a house of death, and maybe a cradle for catastrophic extinction, too. "The Arctic has been the locus for Armageddon two generations in a row now. It was the front line of the Cold War," she writes, and now it's the stage for "apocalyptic climate change." Wheeler investigates the Arctic region by region, interrogating the cultures that call it home.
Alaska, of course, is the polar region most familiar to we Americans, and it is well known as the home of Sarah Palin, whose name was a fearful synonym to many for the end of the world in 2008. It seems the only time we ever hear about Alaska down here in the contiguous United States is when something dies: Chris McCandless's death in Into the Wild, the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Wheeler relates a horrifying and funny anecdote in which Exxon's PR department shipped 250 oily otters to rehabilitation centers at the expense of $90,000 per otter for the sake of television news crews, while every other seaborne animal in Prince William Sound died).
Wheeler explores the Arctic wastes of Greenland and Russia and Canada. She talks with natives and scientists, and researches stories of doomed Arctic explorers who leave Europe in high-tech dirigibles and are found, decades later, perfectly preserved around frozen campfires. Whales are murdered and stripped bare by maggotlike humans. Wheeler examines the north in literature (it's the only place where Frankenstein's death-denied monster can disappear into a simulacrum of death's release) and in mundane ways, too. Even today, life barely survives in the grocery stores of the Canadian north:
Fresh food was limited to California peaches so withered that it seemed inconceivable anyone would ever buy them, coal-black bananas in a similar condition, shriveled grapes, moldy cheese, and cartons of milk well past their sell-by date (at least they were half price). There was no bread. Of processed food, there was an abundance. Gloopy cheesy dips in plastic tubs, packets of flavored sugar crystals for the preparation of fizzy drinks, pot noodles, instant mashed potatoes, snack-size "pepperoni" sausages, lurid Miracle Whip, fluorescent candies, and more, much more.
It is not a story about death, but Death is at least the romantic interest. You can feel her grinning, skull-like, from the margins of every page. 
