Andrew Foster Altschul’s new-ish novel, Lady Lazarus, is as heavy as it is beautiful. Its nonstop cultural and historical references necessitate a huge amount of effort on the part of readers, and I found myself stopping nearly every page to check Google (or Altschul’s handy guide in the back of the book) in order to locate the references. As such, it took me almost nine months to finish the novel (including the long breaks that the exhausting subject matter demanded I take). Altschul’s prose is beautiful and the book is obviously as well-researched and self-aware as a piece of literature can be. Lady Lazarus is rewarding and culturally edifying, but it won’t make you feel good. No book about suicide ever will.
Nominally, Lady Lazarus follows the fictional poet/celebrity Calliope Bird Morath through her literary career until her death (don’t worry, her death isn’t a surprise ending—it’s the only sure thing in the entire novel). Throughout the novel, Calliope struggles to be recognized for her poetry and not for her role as the daughter of punk god and suicide victim Brandt Morath. As grief and celebrity drive Calliope deeper and deeper into the throes of her poetic, Sylvia-Plath-esque insanity, she begins to buy into popular theories that Brandt may have faked his death. This inspires her to search for him in increasingly extreme ways. The search ends with her suicide-by-rabid-crowd, after which Calliope (presumably) joins her father in the afterlife reserved for musician suicides (“The Great Gig in the Sky”).
Actually, the novel follows another character—Calliope’s obsessive biographer—more closely. The fact that the biographer character’s name is Andrew Foster Altschul and that he consistently refers to himself as “the author” is both brilliant and annoying. As novel-Altschul exposes, via real-life-Altschul, Calliope’s story, we get a glimpse of novel-Altschul’s life story that only the omniscient narrator novel-Altschul would be able to provide. Real-life-Altschul uses this literary technique to force readers into questioning what is meaningful and what isn’t—both in the novel and in our real life obsessions with celebrities, literature, and conspiracy theories. This literary device also has another effect: like most impenetrable works of genius (Pink Floyd’s entire album The Dark Side of the Moon, appropriately, leaps to mind), it made me feel as if I were being laughed at by someone much more intelligent than I. It wasn’t a particularly nice feeling. Although the references I was able to catch without any help from the endnotes or a Google search boosted my ego, the majority of the novel was one big, gorgeous downer.
The sheer amount of effort that real-life-Altschul put into his novel is impressive at the very least. Every word in the novel is perfectly placed, and there is hardly a sentence that does not provide either an outside reference or a double meaning. This is not to mention the fact that real-life-Altschul had to compose poetry and do heaps of research (on topics ranging from Zen Buddhism to honey production) to make the novel complete and accurate. Thought-provoking, sobering, eloquent, self-contradictory, and entertaining, Lady Lazarus achieves about as much as any literary work can.
Lady Lazarus is a worthwhile read for anyone with the patience and humility to give it the thought it deserves. However, if you’re depressed, an entire plot revolving around (and knowingly participating in) the fetishization of suicide could potentially be triggering. Dive into Lady Lazarus at your own risk—it is one of the most horrifically inspirational books you will ever read.