Annie Kagan

Annie Kagan has written one of the best Afterlife books I've read. But that's a qualified plaudit.

At core, this is the story of a younger sibling, Ms. Kagan, saddled, by life, with a ne'er-do-well alcoholic older brother, the eponymous, and deceased (but not entirely gone), Billy Fingers. The latter is an organized-crime kind of name and guy. He can't get off the booze. He creates all kinds of drama and havoc in his loved ones' lives. Ms. Kegan's story, then, is that of a younger sister finding a way to forgive her older brother. And Ms. Kagan really handles that part of the story well. Three-stars worth of "well," in fact.

But now to the matter of published accounts of Afterlife experiences.

We’re all familiar with books on the subject, right? We’ve all clucked our tongues at books of this kind, shelved and sheltered there in Barnes & Noble’s New Age section. We’ve all seen these books' authors addressing medium-sized, sartorially eccentric crowds, soft music playing in the background (perhaps some celtic Enya, some yonic Yanni, or maybe only the lonely susurration of subdued-yet-also-strangely-insistent panpipery): authorial men with their shaved heads and pale faces and brown corduroy pants and sensible Timberland dress shoes with clownishly rounded toes; men who evade perfectly reasonable questions of fact by touching their index fingers’ tips to the bottoms of their lips, in attitudes of feigned supplication, saying: I’m not sure if I can tell you about that; let me ask my spirit guide. And the women authors, these women of arcane erudition seated, ridiculously and indecorously, behind folding tables, elephantine women wearing knitted caftans and gauzy aquarelle scarves tied loosely about the neck, imperious women who brook neither dissent nor fashion advice, and who take irritating attitudes of soaring superiority over any and all other spiritual experiences that aren't their own. All of which is to say that, like you, I have my prejudices about Life After Death experiences and NDEs and the people who publish stories about them.

In fact, the two biggest problems I have with the genre are setting and veridicality.

Setting: All or most Afterlife stories occur in realms that are decontextualized to the point of absurdity. There are talks of radiant skies in outer space, of lapis lazuli lakes of pure glitter-sparkle splish-splash, of shining reticular ions, of rainbows, of guardian angels soaring on the backs of butterflies over rolling meadows, and the listener thinks, How exactly do I back my way out of this conversation? So what am I trying to tell you? Nothing. Everything. Sometimes a wind blows and you and I float along in light. I find terror and you find love; the difference, in other words, isn’t out there but in here. I’m pointing at my heart. Simply put: Describing the world of the dead to the living must be like performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony via symbolic logic for a wombat. Ridiculous. Hopelessly quixotic. Even still, some authors perform the symphony better than others, and Ms. Kagan is down right Deutsche Grammophon-esque here.

Then there’s the problem of “veridicality.” This is a highly specialized term. It refers to an Afterlife account that can be proved true, as opposed to one that is mere fantasy or hallucination. As F.W.H. Myers put it (somewhat recursively) in his renowned work The Human Personality And Its Survival Of Bodily Death, “The only valid evidence ... for veridicality depends on a coincidence with some external event.” Thus, we may label as “veridical” an Afterlife experience whose subject, upon returning to life, is able to describe, say, a shoe on a high hospital ledge that he or she had floated up past on his or her way to the great beyond, which high ledge, upon later inspection by third party, turns out to indeed have sitting upon it -- exactly where and as described -- the shoe. The shoe is proof of veridicality. Another example: an upward-floating NDE’ing spirit, pausing for a sec in an ER’s ceiling’s far corner, sees a doctor working feverishly to revive that spirit’s former and mortal body, and sees that same doctor, up to her eyeballs in a triage frenzy, absentmindedly and hurriedly place a pen or watch or scalpel on the crash-cart’s second lower shelf, which absentmindedly placed item is in fact there exactly as described upon later, post-revival inspection by disinterested third party(-ies). These veridical factual foundations may seem somewhat flimsy -- tenuous matters indeed or perhaps -- but they constitute the Afterlife Account’s breath and bread. Faith is the assurance of hope, the evidence of things unseen. But payment for the book must be in legal tender.

Fortunately, Ms. Kagan skirts all matters of veridicality by embracing the, as it were, Ganesh in this genre's living room: That is, she frames her story in a Creative Writing critique group. The author, while writing amateur fiction for crowd correction, is more or less psychically tackled by her dearly (or dastardlily) departed sibling's loquacious shade, who then uses Ms. Kagan as a "channel" to tell us his story. In other words, Ms. Kagan gives the skeptical reader a very easy "veridicality" out, which thus allows that reader to simply read what is, in fact, a semi-moving account of a two siblings learning to finally get along.

But don't get me wrong: I do believe in life after death. I just don't believe a lot of what I read about it. But barring any direct experience, reading about it's all I've got to go on.… (mehr)