The City is inhabited by the recently deceased, who reside there only as long as they remain in the memory of the living. Once populated by the billions, the City is rapidly losing citizens; entire populations appear in the City one morning and are gone by the same evening. Back on Earth, Laura is stranded on Antarctica, utterly alone and completely isolated from the rest of civilization. The two narrative strands are, of course, connected and Kevin Brockmeier artfully ties them together in his mysterious new novel The Brief History of the Dead,\ a thought-provoking work which examines the nature of memory and its relationship with death and the departed.
Brockmeier is originally a short story writer and the short-fiction technique he has cultivated over the years transfers well into the novel format. Used to packing a lot of emotive power into a small amount of space, Brockmeier is wonderfully effective and efficient when detailing imagery. Take, for example, his description of two characters' ""crossing,"" the unique trip made after death from the real world to the City:
""Lev Paley said that he had watched his atoms break apart like marbles, roll across the universe, then gather themselves together again out of nothing. Hanbing Li said that he woke inside the body of an aphid and lived an entire life in the flesh of a single peach.""
Brockmeier's considerable short-fiction skill is also applied to the structure of the novel. Every chapter has the feel of a complete, self-contained story; indeed, the beginning chapter was originally published as a short story, appearing in the O. Henry Prize Series. The shifting narrative between chapters further defines the singularity of each section, as a character will inhabit one chapter and then fade into shadows, allowing another to step forward. The only constant link is Laura and her plight at the bottom of the planet.
The intertwining stories of the dead and the living make for interesting juxtapositions, and Brockemeier artfully mines this literary material. In the novel, as perhaps in the actual world, the dead and living engage in a symbiotic relationship: Laura draws on the strength given her by the memories of deceased loved ones and the dead owe their continued existences to Laura's memory. It is an interesting interaction, one that Brockmeier subtly sprinkles throughout the book.
While ""Dead"" owes much of its success to its structure, the short-fiction aspect of the novel also gives rise to its most important flaw. Because characters fade in and out with the passing chapters and the narrative constantly shifts back and forth from the City to Laura, the characters never give enough time of fully develop into completely believable, rounded individuals. Only Laura is sufficiently portrayed, and even her character is curiously static.
Above all, though, ""Dead"" is a story of memories, their meanings and many metamorphoses; for memories are a sort of life, and forgetfulness a sort a death—a death from which there can never be a resurrection. Brockmeier leads us first through our physical end and then to the brink of our spiritual dissolution, a fluid state where one exists dangling on the cusp of another's recollection, not alive in any spatial sense but not yet thrown to the abyss. It is this oblivion Brockmeier thrusts upon the reader and the reader can either retreat further into the labyrinth of the mind or realize even death is but a brief chapter in eternity's history.
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