The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Death in Equality by Lucinda EbersoleSusann Cokal
Lucinda Ebersole. Death in Equality. St. Martin’s, 1997. 146 pp. $19.95.
“Equality” is a small town in Alabama where people go to die, especially people called Cordelia, the last in a line of whom has left New York and lies riddled with cancer. Hers is one of the main narrative voices in the most recent work by Lucinda Ebersole, who is perhaps best known for editing the Mondo anthologies (Barbie, Elvis, etc.).
Cordelia is the “greatest unpublished novelist of her generation,” soon to become something less than a footnote in literary history—her books unwritten, her stories untold. But another voice, belonging to Cordelia’s writing self, intervenes. It not only tells us most of what we know about Cordelia (she herself describes primarily the geography games she plays with her nurses and the hallucinogenic, erotic effects of pain); it also relates myriad tales of deaths that have already taken place in Equality: a premature baby, an elderly stroke victim, a little boy who baited his fishhook with baby water moccasins and died because the first hospital he was taken to did not accept “coloreds.” Relentlessly, Ebersole introduces one character after another and then snatches them all away; the one character who reappears in several stories, Augusta, remains underdeveloped, as if to say people become interesting—become real—only as death approaches.
The stories are linear and unlayered, their outcome foregone; but taken together, they add up to something. They convey a sense of both the universality of death and the complicated private process of dying, and they remind us that death is the great leveler: it brings everyone, whether young, old, white, or black, into that mythical state of equality. [Susann Cokal]