Review: 'The Unwritten Book,' by Samantha Hunt

The title of Samantha Hunt's "The Unwritten Book" refers in part to an unfinished fiction manuscript her late father wrote. Like a lot of drawer novels, it's messy, overwritten and mired in a plot too quirky to have ever reached the finish line. (Human unassisted flight, spycraft, Reader's Digest magazine, etc.) But it has an eerie pull, and Hunt is confident that unearthing it will be a valuable exercise.

"With these pages, I thought, I'll talk with the dead," she writes.

And so she does, using not just her father's book but stacks of others, her personal experiences, and random observations to explore our relationship with death. Or, more specifically, the way we try to avoid facing our own mortality. Everywhere she looks — and she's looking hard — she finds evidence of the ways we blinker ourselves to the inevitable. Practically everything she encounters feels death-stalked to her.

But that's not to suggest that the book is morbid. The pages of her father's book are annotated with lively ruminations, memories and critical readings. One section remarkably weaves the fandom she shares with her daughters for the boy band One Direction with an ovarian-cancer scare. In the process, she inverts conventional tropes about motherhood and domesticity.

"No one has ever looked at my kids and said, 'You made three deaths. You must really understand life,' " she writes. "I'd like to see that Mother's Day card."

Hunt has developed a knack for this kind of rethinking — haunted but not bleak — in novels like "Mr. Splitfoot." She likes outliers and innovators, both in her own work (one of her novels is about Nikola Tesla) and others (Calvino, Borges, Sebald, Murakami). "All plots tend to move deathward," Don DeLillo once wrote, and the peculiar, unique pleasure of "The Unwritten Book" is seeing how Hunt can use just about anything to force our gaze toward our certain end.

That's an acquired taste in any book, and Hunt doesn't always make it easy in hers. Her own prose, like her father's, at times rambles. An essay about a busybody who calls her parenting into question shuttles from comments on policing, James Baldwin, yellowjackets and a nature preserve. There's no doubt a clearer way to her endpoint, but for her everything is grist for the mill. As she puts it, "my impulse is to jam-pack every last indication and event inside."

As imperfect as Hunt's book is, though, it also feels like a book that will last as a polestar for writers in years to come. It's a handbook for writing about loss and death that isn't sunk in morality and sentiment. It offers us permission to use the oddest, unlikeliest pieces of ourselves as object lessons in mortality. And it's an example of how to write about the subject with verve and openness. "Everywhere we walk or swim is a cemetery," she writes. But, she's quick to add: "Everywhere is sacred."

Mark Athitakis is a book critic and writer in Arizona.

The Unwritten Book: An Investigation

By: Samantha Hunt.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $28