Word: tuckers
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...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...
...says ("tightly") by way of farewell: "You make me want to write!" and adds in a letter: "My dear, calm friend! . . . You are noble . . . You manage to make a kind of dance of it." Not all will want to follow the last steps of the dreadful dance, when Lael Tucker's second husband (whom she divorced to marry Wertenbaker) visits the dying man and sitting before the fire says: "You are the best . . . Tell me what you want...
...Lael Tucker pleads a moral cause: a kind of private euthanasia, her husband's "right to die as he wished to, when he chose." She knows that this claim is based on pride: several times during the last painful months, the Wertenbakers gaily toasted what they called their hubris, a word which they thought defined their own gallant pagan defiance of fate. Each reader will have to judge the moral issue for himself; the real significance lies in the fact that, in this book, the issue is only seen in terms of responsibility to oneself and to other human...