by Matt Sitman
The late David Rakoff’s posthumously released novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, is written entirely in rhyme. Heller McAlpin sets up the clip above, a reading from the book:
Rakoff saves his most scathing jabs for the perpetually discontented social climber, Susan, who, after ditching her Oberlin boyfriend for his more-likely-to-succeed best friend Josh, cruelly asks cuckolded Nathan to toast them at their garishly opulent Great Neck wedding. His valiant — but, fortunately, not entirely successful — effort to keep his bitterness in check results in a fabulous tangled allegory about a tortoise and a scorpion — whose “nature” it is to stab. This toast — part of NPR’s First Read and recorded as part of an episode of This American Life before Rakoff died — deserves to become a classic.
Emily Landau lauds the humorist’s moral worldview:
To understand Rakoff’s ethics, you must first understand his anxiety, a condition that underlined everything he wrote, and could easily have put him at a disadvantage. After all, optimism, liberalism, and self-actualization form the core of American values; anxiety is seen as a character flaw. For Rakoff, though, anxiety and its attendant pessimism were just as valid as optimism. “Defensive pessimism is about sweating the small stuff, being prepared for contingencies like some neurotic Jewish Boy Scout, and in doing so, not letting oneself be crippled by fear,” he wrote in Half Empty.
He was not, however, a nihilist. His melancholia was vaguely romantic, as though some scientist had swirled Heathcliff’s DNA in a petri dish with Tevye the dairyman’s. Rakoff’s essays were elegantly drawn and ordered, tinged with empathy, courage, and a shred of hope.
Previous Dish coverage of Rakoff here.
The Dish 