The Disintegrations
by Alistair McCartney
University of Wisconsin Press. 232 pages, $26.95
A SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL meditation on death, Alistair McCartney’s The Disintegrations has the feeling of a conversation between new friends, exploring the idea of death through several stories. In fact, the narrator, also named Alistair McCartney, is rather obsessed with death. He teaches at a college in Los Angeles directly across from a cemetery, so he looks at “death” almost every day. He frequently walks around the grounds, at one point watching a funeral in progress. He meets a young man at the cemetery and talks with him. His new friend encourages McCartney to spend the night with him among the gravestones, but he thinks twice about it and runs away.
McCartney is full of information about death, much of it gleaned on-line. He writes: “most humans use the internet to connect with the living. I prefer to use it to connect with the dead.” He reveals that the population of the cemetery is 163,471, while the population of the suburb the cemetery is in is 38,816. Some of the more famous residents of the cemetery are Rita Hayworth, Lawrence Welk, and Bela Lugosi. According to McCartney, as a soldier in the Hungarian army, Lugosi hid in a grave and pretended to be dead, which, the actor later claimed, is how he learned how to act. McCartney’s first story involves his paternal grandmother, who visited when Alistair was a young child living in Australia. He remarks on her reserved nature as well as her age, smell, and the look of her skin, all of which made him suspicious of her. He makes a remarkable observation: “all old people are foreign, because they’re closer to death.” Later, after she dies, he observes that his father regularly travels to Scotland to visit her grave, but he “has never mentioned her again.” The next tale is of Robert, McCartney’s former coworker at a restaurant in L.A., who fought drug addiction and died of an overdose. McCartney had run into Robert once after leaving a sexual partner’s apartment, and here the narrator captures perfectly the awkwardness of such a situation. At Robert’s memorial, he describes the “sadness floating around the room, but there was an undertow of … excitement, the thrill, the flutter that accompanies the self-destruction of a fucked-up young man.” Later, McCartney talks about Catherine and David Birnie, a husband and wife team of serial killers who abducted, tortured, and killed several women before being caught. They lived very near McCartney’s childhood home in small-town Australia. Indeed, “from our front door to the Birnies’ front door couldn’t have taken more than four minutes.” His sister Julianne, a student at the same university as one of the victims, could easily have been picked up by the Birnies, and he imagines how they would have used their connection to the neighborhood to get her in the car. The killers were apparently incredibly talkative to the authorities and the media. McCartney is clearly fascinated by them and goes into detail about their methods and backgrounds, even delving into theories about why they killed. It makes for engaging, if macabre, reading. While death may be the element that ties these stories together, McCartney spends most of his time writing about the lives of his subjects, their struggles, their passions, and their loves. In the process, he gradually reveals more about himself, as well. The Disintegrations is an unusual work of fiction that makes for a compelling reading experience. ________________________________________________________ Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland.
