The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Death: it's never been sexier.
Literati and sports fans alike know the writing of David Shields, author of several books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a highly charged exploration of race politics surrounding the NBA that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle and PEN/USA Awards. Currently an English professor at the University of Washington, his profession as a teacher seems strikingly sedentary considering the obsession with physicality in his latest work, The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead.

In The Thing About Life, Shields writes nothing less than a “biography” of the human body, exploring physical reality so ecstatically that it is hard to sit still while listening. An obsession with mortality haunts every moment, so much so that Shields often conflates sexual drives and death. At one point, he charts the decay of our bodies in terms of the decline of our fertility: After menopause, women’s faces appear gaunt, as fat stores are depleted from their once-smooth cheeks. And as men produce fewer viable sperm, they shed hair and struggle with enlarged prostate glands. Yet, the way Shields writes about it, my future gaunt face does not depress me; instead, I see it within a context greater than my individual vanity.

It is perfect, then, that he grounds the book in a lifelong conflict with his father, a centigenarian-wanna-be whose obsession with life clashes with the author’s equal obsession with death. This larger, generational context adds richness and depth — tapping into universal tensions and fears. In fact, Shields calls the book an “autobiography of my body, a biography of my father’s body, an anatomy of our bodies together, especially my dad’s — his body, his relentless body.” The word “relentless” is key: Shields is nothing if not conflicted about his father: “And I love him and I hate him,” he writes. “And I want him to live forever, and I want him to die, tomorrow.” It all feels terribly Freudian.

For Shields, our psychological, spiritual, and physical lives are as entangled as strands of DNA — each dictating and reinforcing the other, propelling us not only into puberty and aging, but also into conflicts with mothers, fathers and children — much like the one with his father at the heart of this book. He weaves strands of science, psychology, memoir and philosophy as tightly as X- and Y-chromosomes, and yet, also keeps them separate enough for one to resonate with the other — like the interplay of genes.

Veteran narrator Don Leslie's website describes his voice as "deep, authoritative, velvety and resonant," and all of these adjectives hold true for his reading of The Thing About Life. Not only does his rich voice have a fatherly authority, but it also saturates the text with sexual tension. He has a way of smoothing consonants and drawing out vowels to make them ooze sex — further highlighting the intricate connection between sex and death.

It disappoints me, though, that Shields does not himself narrate the text. As he ponders the human attraction to deep voices and revels in bodily existence, I feel robbed of his physical reality.