The Unexamined Life (Page 2)

Somewhere in the middle of his memoir, Wilsey offers this characteristically vague description of his boyhood friend Spencer's family, with whom Sean spends a lot of time when he's in his early teens:

Mr. Perry was forbearing and rarely seen. Mrs. Perry was sick with cancer, bedridden, and sweetly crazy. Spencer's little brother, Scott, had fought off his own bout of cancer with chemo and gone bald when he was eight. It had made him the type of self-possessed kid you just did not worry about ever. Probably because it hurt too much to worry about him.

Now, why is Mrs. Perry "sick with cancer" and "sweetly crazy"? Is she the latter because of the former? If not, how can she be sweetly crazy independent of being so ill with cancer that she cannot leave her bed? If she is sweetly crazy--typically, Wilsey tells us that she is, but doesn't show how she is--it must have something to do with her condition, to the extent that it makes no sense to describe her eccentricity as if it had nothing to do with her condition.

And did Scott's "bout" with cancer and his loss of hair really make him "self-possessed"? Who is this "you" who never worried about Scott? It can't be anyone in his family, who all must be terrified that at any moment in the future of this very young boy, the cancer will begin again, and terrified also that with mother and son both sick with cancer, everyone else in the family is genetically vulnerable to the disease. The bit about it hurting "too much to worry about" would seem like a conscientious corrective to the previous sentence if it weren't so patently insincere: You still don't know who's doing or not doing the worrying. Anyway, if you have a son or brother who nearly died of cancer, you can't help but worry about him, whether worrying "hurts" or not.

You have to keep reminding yourself that Wilsey is a person venting rather than a writer writing, and that Oh the Glory of It All is a prolonged private outpouring rather than a book. If you don't remember this, you'll end up putting the book aside upon reaching the second page, where Wilsey relates that his superrich father pleased his gold-digging mother because "he helped her want things she did not know to want." But was there anything worth having that Wilsey's mother, portrayed by him as a calculating social climber who married his father for his money, "did not know to want"? You feel the urge to protest that a serious book should have the basics of psychological insight, especially about the author's own life. Instead, you have to be patient because, like an unreflective person and not like a writer, Wilsey is in the process of finding out who he is. He is writing a memoir without self-understanding, as well as without insight into other people.

Reviewers of Wilsey's book have noted that his portrayals of his parents and stepmother are crude, one-dimensional and cartoonlike. Wilsey doesn't seem to care about making sense of them as complicated, interesting people: "But how can I explain Dede? She's my evil stepmother. She's an unbelievable cliché." However, people are not clichés, and declaring that they are doesn't make it so. I don't want to be unkind to Sean Wilsey. Nobody does. That's the critic's problem with simulated books, in a nutshell. At one point, Wilsey tells us that his similarly superprivileged stepbrothers "liked the Police. I had not heard of the Police. My favorite song was the theme song from the Royal Viking Star cruise liner." This is charming and funny--one of the book's few comical moments--but Wilsey is being sincere. He often seems to be writing with an open heart, and out of an open wound. If only a fraction of the stories he relates are true--he tells us that Dede routinely berated him for being a "faggot" when he was a boy--you will want to give him a hug.

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