‘Where There’s Pain For Me,There’s Humor’

In her striking debut novel, Elisa Albert confronts death head-on, with a heavy dose of levity.

The author’s older brother died of a brain tumor at 29. “In a lot of ways my book is my attempt to address that experience,” Albert says. Marion Ettlinger

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

In the language of flowers, the dahlia can mean gratitude, dignity, elegance, instability and betrayal; it’s a floral wild card. Elisa Albert’s title character in her striking debut novel, “The Book of Dahlia” (Free Press) is, similarly, a young woman whose many sides don’t always match.

“The Book of Dahlia” is about dying. It’s full of Albert’s distinctive humor, which she fine-tuned in her short story collection, “Why This Night Is Different.” But there’s nothing flowery in the way the author confronts death head-on.

The first chapter is set “on the last day of her ignorance,” that is, the day before Dahlia suffers from a grand mal seizure that announces the massive brain tumor that will cut short her young life. The novel

follows the structure of a self-help book with the kind of can-do positive attitude that’s foreign to Dahlia, called “It’s Up to You: Your Cancer To-Do List,” woven together with memories of her earlier life.

The author’s older brother died of a brain tumor when he was 29 — Dahlia’s age.

“In a lot of ways my book is my attempt to address that experience,” Albert says.

For Albert, who teaches creative writing at Columbia University, humor is a natural response to difficult subject matter. As she explains, “That’s where I go. Where there’s pain for me, there’s humor; it’s a matter of course. If I hit on something less painful, there may be less humor — the bigger the pain, the bigger the need for levity, for something to let the air out of the pain.”

Dahlia is a smart and likeable underachiever; she’s self-absorbed, repeatedly broke but saved by her wealthy father, vulnerable, lazy, loving and easily heartbroken. Having returned to her native Los Angeles after a sojourn bartending and lounging in New York after college, she spends her time in the Venice cottage her father bought for her watching movies, taking hot showers, smoking pot, eating toaster pastries and sleeping. At times, she has thought of social-work school, even rabbinical school, but mostly she’s tired from trying to decide what to do with her life.

“She was living her life isometrically: action with no movement,” Albert writes. The headaches and sluggishness that may have been symptoms of her cancer just seemed like part of her usual state.

Her divorced parents come together with relative ease in crisis. Her father is sweet, the kind of man who wants to believe the best about people even as they prove him wrong. Her Israeli-born mother, who’s “never without a half-dozen too many pieces of jewelry,” left the family 20 years earlier without ever glancing back. Dahlia is estranged from her brother — she adored him growing up, but he cruelly let her down again and again — and has “a kind of disdain for her only sibling usually reserved for despotic political regimes and perpetrators of genocide.” Her brother, a rabbi, is indifferent to his sister, even as he is revered and counted on by all kinds of people in need. While growing up, Dahlia came to feel she was “walking the tightrope of life all by herself.”

After the seizure, she spends six days in a coma, and doctors predict that she has about nine months to live. Albert writes that she wasn’t floating above life — as a pop-culture fallacy of near-death experience would have it, that the “near-dead are looking down on life and can watch it like a movie” — but rather, underneath it.

Dahlia becomes “the guest of honor at the table of however long she had left.” Flashbacks to her earlier life and misadventures are darkly comic; as are her experiences in her “Living with Cancer” group. Albert perfectly juxtaposes details and cultural references.

There’s no happy ending here. Dahlia’s death was always a fact for Albert. She felt “early on that her death was going to be a quote-unquote tragedy, despite the fact that she has a difficult, some might say, wasted life.”

She notes that Dahlia’s illness didn’t confer nobility, nor was she redeemed in a traditional way. But, as she points out, “It’s never too late for somebody to achieve something new in themselves. Her final moments are of a sort of lament for her, for those lost possibilities. The fact that her dying does not accord anything traditionally recognizable as meaningful or beautiful, maybe that in itself is beautiful.”

Having seen the American culture of death firsthand, Albert is an admirer of those who treat it in a straightforward manner. She says that she watched the television series “Six Feet Under,” about a family-run funeral home, all the way through its run, and found it moving and profound while others found it dark and depressing.

“When I’d talk about it, people would recoil,” she says. “It’s a recurring theme when death comes up. People want to run away. I noticed it in my own life when I’ve lost people. Most can’t deal with it.” She goes on to praise the Jewish laws and rituals connected with death and mourning, as wise and profoundly helpful.

When asked if Dahlia feels like someone she knows, she replies, “Absolutely. I have known many people who share a lot with Dahlia — men and women. I’ve seen the male loser pothead experience reflected all over fiction. I really haven’t seen too much of his counterpart in females. I’m invested in taking that as far as I can take it.”

She says that she has also known people like Dahlia’s brother the rabbi, whose capacity for real empathy is stunted. “In contrast to Dahlia, who had no boundaries, he’s nothing but boundaries. Playing with that relationship was a really intense thing for me. It gets to the heart of basic human problems, the clash between those kinds of people in the world.

“That he’s a rabbi was just a tool to show that these types of people can be incredibly productive in a shallow way and be very positive in the world,” Albert says. “I like that contract. Publicly, he’s a character who’s very respected; outwardly he seems quite noble and functional, but inwardly is anything but. Dahlia is the opposite. Outwardly, she’s completely a screw-up, but inwardly feels more deeply and honestly invested in her own heart and soul than he is.

“They’re sort of yin and yang.”

Elisa Albert will read from “The Book of Dahlia” on Thursday, April 3 at Barnes & Noble, 97 Warren St. (at Greenwich Street) in Manhattan, at 7 p.m. and on Sunday, April 6 at KGB Bar (with Joanna Hershon), 85 E. Fourth St. in Manhattan, at 7 p.m.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization