Mortality

The New York Times Book Review

The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything [Hitchens] wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant. An eighth and final chapter consists…of unfinished "fragmentary jottings" that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. They're vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting—messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going…Being in Christopher's company was rarely sobering, but always exhilarating. It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his "year of living dyingly" in the grip of the alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down.
—Christopher Buckley

Publishers Weekly

Diagnosed with the esophageal cancer to which he eventually succumbed in December 2011, cultural critic Hitchens found himself a finalist in the race of life, and in his typically unflinching and bold manner, he candidly shares his thoughts about his suffering, the etiquette of illness and wellness, and religion in this stark and powerful memoir. Commenting on the persistent metaphor of battle that doctors and friends use to describe his life with cancer (most of this book was published in Vanity Fair), Hitchens mightily challenges this image, for “when you sit in a room... and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier is the very last one that will occur to you.” As a result of his various treatments, Hitchens begins to lose his voice, which, given his life as public gadfly through writing and speeches, devastates him. “What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.” Hitchens’s powerful voice compels us to consider carefully the small measures by which we live every day and to cherish them. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

A jovially combative riposte to anyone who thought that death would silence master controversialist Hitchens (Hitch-22, 2010, etc.). Even as he lay--or sat or paced--dying in the unfamiliar confines of a hospital last year, the author had plenty to say about matters of life and death. Here, in pieces published in Vanity Fair to which are added rough notes and apothegms left behind in manuscript, Hitchens gives the strongest possible sense of his exhausting battle against the aggressive cancer spreading through his body. He waged that battle with customary sardonic good humor, calling the medical-industrial world into which he had been thrust "Tumortown." More arrestingly, Hitchens conceived of the move from life to death as a sudden relocation, even a deportation, into another land: "The country has a language of its own--a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication--as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to." One such gesture was the physician's plunging of fingers into the neck to gauge whether a cancer had spread into the lymph nodes, but others were more subtle, including the hushed tones and reverences that came with the business. Hitchens, famously an atheist, visited the question of whether he should take Pascal's wager and bet on God, concluding in the negative even as good God-fearing citizens filled his inbox with assurances that God was punishing him for his blasphemies with throat cancer. A reasonable thought, Hitchens concludes, though since he's a writer, wouldn't such a God have afflicted his hands first? Certainly, Hitchens died too soon. May this moving little visit to his hospital room not be the last word from him.

Katie Roiphe

Remarkable . . . The book's power lies in its simplicity, in its straightforward, intelligent documenting, its startling refusal of showiness or melodrama or grandeur....The great polemicist, essayist, conversationalist, provocateur, arguer, has done something extraordinary in this book. He has created yet another style, another mode, another way of being and thinking and dreaming, on his death bed; he has written in many ways an un-Hitchens-like book, eluding proclamations, resolutions, mastery, wit, at-easeness with opinion, in favor of unnerving directness, of harrowing documentation. He has allowed his dismantled confidence, his undoing to breathe, and to live in the pages, in a way that is startling and new and an achievement unlike his others, different in kind, yet equally ambitious and relentlessly honest.
— Slate.com

Christopher Buckley

Like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant . . .vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting - messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going . . . a final, defiant, and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness . . . It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his 'year of living dyingly' in the grip of an alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down.
— New York Times Book Review

NPR.org

This trenchant, sassy, tragically posthumous little black book earns a proud spot on the end-of-life shelf, along with Julian Barnes' Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index, Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, and Philip Roth's Everyman and Exit Ghost, to name just a few.

Newsday

A book driven by his desire to look death squarely in the face and provoked by detractors who were certain he would turn to religion when confronted with it. He did not... [MORTALITY is] full of humility, a humility worthy of kings.

The New York Daily News

The melancholy irony of 'Mortality' is that it gave our best essayist - I can't think of someone who comes even close - the chance to grapple with the most intractable subject, to wrestle with the angel of death in a battle we will all have to lose at one time or another.....The voice is gone. The words remain.

Bookpage

These essays are brave and fitting final words from a writer at the end of his journey.

Wall Street Journal

There are no clever pitches to diminish the horror vacui of oblivion. He offers no self-pity or special pleading. The book is tough-minded . . . poignant, but the poignancy is ours, not his.

Salon

Mortality is a crash course in lived philosophy....bracing.

Boston Globe

Unsparingly blunt, rhetorically suave . . . It's rare that someone so powerfully writes of such deep connections between the death of intellectual ability and the decay of the body.

San Francisco Chronicle

To the end, he produces sentences of startling beauty and precision . . . One of our best is gone, yet "Mortality" is a powerful and moving final utterance.

Huffington Post

Mortality is not just for Hitchens' fans, but for all.... With almost unimaginable clarity, grace and wit, even for the master wordsmith we had grown used to. We see here a very warm and thoughtful human being. Poignant and deeply personal thoughts on the art of writing and the heartbreak of losing his unmistakable speaking voice during the course of treatment....The furthest thing from grim, Mortality is a gift. Not just from Christopher, but from Carol as well. Do pick it up.

PopMatters.com

Reading and responding to the Hitch is ceaselessly inspiring and seldom less than exhilarating. More, it is an instigatory experience: it compels you to get involved more deeply with the world around and inside you. Reading any worthwhile writer is an act of celebration, a shared reaction to the act of creation. More, it is an exercise in how to write, read, think and live.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Anyone looking for a stately, meditative rumination on what it is like to die — provided such happy-go-lucky folks exist — would certainly find a haymaker-in- waiting with this collection of essays from Christopher Hitchens entitled Mortality. Felled by cancer around Christmastime, 2011 — after being diagnosed in June 2010 — the irascible Hitchens decided to chronicle his life at the exit stage phase over the course of number of pieces for Vanity Fair, with those pieces now comprising the chapters of this book, a lesson in sidling up to the Reaper and learning something, despite the prickly company.

Thanatos-heavy works of literature — and this is one grim prose docudrama, despite Hitchens's admirable curiosity and defiance — don't exactly make for winning beach companions, something to pull out of the tote bag as the sun hangs overhead. But they can allow for moments of the most pungent black comedy, as any reader of the final installments of Tristram Shandy — with Laurence Sterne jokingly wondering if he'll be alive to pen the next chapter — would grant. "I feel upsettingly denatured," Hitchens declares, upon having his chest shaved, a man at once bemused and capable of irony, even as he accepts — grudgingly — that the particular life lessons on display are going to have to be picked up at an accelerated rate. Naturally, plenty of people step forward to try and forestall this book's hulking inevitable, that figure of not now, maybe, but soon, very soon. A professor gets in touch to suggest that Hitchens have his entire corpus cryonically frozen, so that he can be unthawed someday, when a cure has been worked out. Break out the chuckles. "When I failed to reply to this, I got a second missive, suggesting that I freeze at least my brain so that its cortex could be appreciated by posterity. Well, I mean to say, gosh, thanks awfully."

If Hitchens isn't always convivial — and really, who could be, in such a situation — he's perpetually dialogic, bounding from one conversation with himself to another, in search of answers — more so, one has the sense, for himself, than us. We're here to pick up on any that he happens to come upon, for when, of course, it's our turn to be on the examining table, or in the ICU, or poked and prodded by a couple dozen doctors who can only shake their heads, commiserate, and shake their heads some more.

Having said that, this isn't something akin to Sherwin Nuland's bestselling (remarkably? depressingly?) How We Die, a step-by-step walk-through on what you'll experience as you meet your end, which is most likely to be through something clinical, although there's also a chapter covering what it'd be like to be crushed by a car. And while Hitchens isn't crushed by anything, really, in Mortality one does pick up on the oppressive strain of, simply, not knowing. What comes next, what the final few seconds will feel like, whether anything continues (Hitchens refused to renounce his atheism, which pleased his fans, and inspired a number of Christians to heckle him about the devil, hell's fires, and various demon-devised punishments), and whether, in the end, it's the mind or the body that prevails.

Hitchens can get a bit wordy as he chronicles his ordeal, yielding the sense that he's determined to chase down that one perfect metaphor that had eluded him — just — to date, and which he hopes to capture, eleventh-hour style. But even when clichés start to filter in, lucidity remains: "So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion."

Mortality concludes with its best, and most inchoate, chapter: a series of jottings, aphorisms, half thoughts, and notes that have a Pascal-esque poetry to them. "Paperwork the curse of Tumortown." "Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can't run away from." "People say — I'm in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!" Indeed. But Mortality is a work where questions beget questions — to say nothing of fears, doubts, crises — along with answers of a defiantly personal variety, even if those answers are incapable of counterattacking the flow of inquiries. Not that there'd be any point to that, as a born question asker like Hitchens surely knew.

Colin Fleming writes for The Atlantic, Slate, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Book Review and publishes fiction with The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, and Black Clock. His first book, Between Cloud and Horizon: A Relationship Casebook in Stories, is forthcoming, and he is at work on a novel about a piano prodigy, called The Freeze Tag Sessions.

Reviewer: Colin Fleming