Like many of us, Mendelsund seems to have stumbled into each chapter of his diverse, sprawling career more or less accidentally, by some combination of luck and circumstance. Unlike many of us, however, he has a tendency to find extraordinary, sometimes unprecedented levels of success in each subsequent stumble.
A musician turned designer turned novelist turned painter, this is a man with a Midas touch for the arts, a man for whom publishing a book — or several, in Mendelsund’s case — is simply “one of life’s weird inevitabilities.”
The idea of having one last lunch, be it with a cherished hero or a beloved friend or family member brought back from the dead, is certainly an intriguing one. The proposition is both daunting and alluring, especially as one grows older and address books become filled with more and more ghosts. And there is all of history to choose from if you wish to pick a hero instead of a friend or family member. Who is the lucky dinner date? What would you say to your chosen one? It’s a tough call.
This is precisely the scenario that Erica Heller has constructed in her new book, One Last Lunch: A Final Meal with the Ones Who Meant So Much to Us. She posed the question to a number of writers and artists: if you could, who would you bring back from the beyond to have a final meal with? The responses ranged from heartfelt longing to whimsical humor, with several seeking an elusive closure by having the last word.
For anyone who needs it, then, there exists within Glück’s work a glossary of today’s moods: rage, vulnerability, despair, gallows humor, irritation, loneliness, an aura of intensity around the mundane. For Glück, these circuits of sensing and thinking—the inner seasons—enact a theory of life: we feel before we understand, and we understand very little.
Writers the world over are grappling with a version of this question: in the face of so much devastation, so much terror, what can fiction possibly achieve? The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is his emphatic, wrenching answer.
On the streets of Hawthorne I sat down and wept.
Yes, wept as I remembered it.
It arrived with the rest of the mail
in our box by the road, came
bearing a standard Forever stamp,