His Masquerade

Herman Melville’s ninth and final novel, published on April Fool’s Day in 1857, landed with a thud. The interlocking tales of a group of passengers on a Mississippi steamboat confounded readers and caused critics to complain that the book should not even count as a novel. Considered a failure in its day, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade is now generally regarded as one of the author’s best books, if not quite measuring up to the masterpiece of Moby Dick (1851). The nineteenth-century novelist’s work provides a useful context for Tom LeClair’s Passing Away, a work that invites similar questions about genre classification and that also features a confidence man or two. Consisting of a novella and two short stories supposedly authored by Michael Keever, LeClair’s alter-identity and meta-narrator, the book is the fourth and last entry in a series featuring this trickster character, although readers do not need to read Passing Off (1996), Passing On (2004), and Passing Through (2006) to enjoy the final outing from the former basketball point guard turned truth-bending memoirist. As the man behind the curtain, so to speak, LeClair is something of a confidence man himself, and it remains to be seen if Passing Away is truly the last in the series. In his recent collection of essays, Harpooning Donald Trump (2017, Melville allusion noted), the author reflects upon the jokey title of his 1972 PhD dissertation, “Final Words,” because the thesis began his career as an academic. Now the author of numerous critical books and novels, this Professor Emeritus still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

Passing Away offers three tales about men who are close to death or thinking about it, but the parts initially do not seem to have much in common beyond that. The first and longest segment is presented as another Keever memoir, this time focused mostly on his dying brother, Patrick. The next and briefest section is the secret journal of former-president Calvin Coolidge, and the concluding part is a heavily-edited letter by Frederic Tudor, a nineteenth-century entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “Ice King.” All three are written by Keever, who tells readers that he teaches creative nonfiction at a university in Cincinnati and whose book, subtitled “Ways of Dying,” is published by Thanatos Press. As readers progress through the pages, the book moves back in time, from the present day to the 1930s and then to the 1860s. One finally reaches Keever’s epilogue, who suggests that his motive for writing the book had to do with exploring “how men in earlier times accepted or evaded their dying,” but the truth about motive is not gleaned so easily in LeClair’s novel. Keever has a track record as an elaborate hoaxer and deceiver; history matters, personally and publically, the novel suggests. While it’s all we have left to examine, the history we reach for is only and always a reconstruction. People still want to be remembered, however, to leave a trace of themselves behind. In Passing Away, men (in particular) strive to leave their mark through sports, business, politics, progeny, literature, and monuments, but there’s a good reason that Keever’s dying brother quotes Shelley: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” “What remains?” the novel asks. Keever himself reflects on the question by recalling the artifact representing a primitive male figure pictured on his (and LeClair’s) book cover: “What did that sculptor hope to achieve? Perhaps some identification with or propitiation of the deity. And what did the sculptor, against the longest odds, gain? If not immortality, then something like permanence.”

Even crumbling sculptures leave something tangible to hold onto, but the writer’s medium is less trustworthy, as history has proved again and again. So why write at all? The three narratives in Passing Away will make readers wonder about humans’ motives for writing, particularly about the past: to understand? to locate the truth? to share wisdom? to account or judge? to document? All of these reasons echo...