Word: lael
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DEATH OF A MAN (181 pp.)-Lael Tucker Wertenbaker-Random House...
...book is painful and embarrassing on many counts. It asks the reader to share what Lael Tucker Wertenbaker calls her "abstract joy in the quality of his death," after which her "winter-white skin turned quite black and stayed dark for two days." It reports every intimate clinical detail of the pain, distress and hopelessness that afflict the victim of terminal cancer. As such, it tends to force into silence critics who may feel that they have been invited to share a private rite that Lael Tucker created about her dying husband-but who have doubts about its public validity...
Blood & Champagne. Lael Tucker, herself a reporter and novelist (Lament for Four Virgins), has told her story with literary skill, and much of it will hit home to readers who neither knew nor cared about Charlie Wertenbaker-the anxious visits to doctors, the peering at X rays, the struggle to live with the truth, the flight from France, where the Wertenbakers lived, to New York for an exploratory operation, the futilities of hospital routine in the face of a dead certainty. The operation only confirmed the death sentence and, unwilling to live as "less than a whole man," Wertenbaker collected...
...cult of death is the other side of the cult of life, as the Hemingway people's worship of the bull ring suggests (it was perhaps no real mistake in identity when, Lael Tucker notes with pleasure, her husband once was mistaken for "Papa" Hemingway at Spain's Pamplona ring). And so a story that is often deeply moving is also overlaid with words and gestures that have the air of gruesome parody, as when Lael Tucker says to her husband in the last moments: "I love you I love you please die." Or when Wertenbaker with...
Novelist Tucker and her publishers should do all right, anyhow. Seven years ago, before leaving for a long stay in Europe, she drew a modest, $250 advance from Random House. Nine months ago, Lael Tucker (wife of Novelist-TIME, Oct. 16, 1950-Charles Christian Wertenbaker) turned in Lament for Four Virgins. After a close look, Random House not only decided to publish it but sold reprint rights, in advance of publication, to Bantam Books for $35,000-a Bantam record for a first novel...