Fatal attraction

People have no idea what death will be like, but they have a clear sense of what the books about it entail. Leaving aside survivor memoirs, we have the physician's handbook (Sherwin Nuland's "How We Die"), the novelist's pained tally of his decay (Philip Roth's "Exit Ghost"), the poet's compulsory assay -- well, what poet doesn't throw a cycle at the final hour? -- and now David Shields' collection of brief, elliptical essays, which amounts to less of a trenchant examination than a "Notes Towards a Death Foretold."

Shields' work is a curious duck. Part childhood reminiscence, part exhaustive compilation of quotes, part statistical ticker, it tackles, Cerberus-like, the philosophical, emotional and corporeal ways our selves ultimately betray us and does so in well-turned prose heading in no particular direction. A chapter might, for instance, begin, "Testosterone initiates the growth spurt . . . stimulates sebaceous gland secretions of oil," slide into a remembrance of Shields' childhood acne -- "I became expert at learning what mirrors would soften the effect" -- then dovetail, amusingly, if inexplicably, into a former president's privates: "Lyndon Johnson frequently urinated in front of his secretary, routinely forced staff members to meet with him in the bathroom while he defecated and liked to show off his penis, which he nicknamed 'Jumbo.' "

As one makes one's way through each brief chapter-essay, this hodgepodge stubbornly refuses to become a whole. I can't help but think that this is because, although quotes and science are marshaled alongside the personal into patiently layered observations, this method patently owes more to Post-its and years of note-taking than to a sojourn at Tinker Creek. As Shields quotes a wide variety of writers, including Carl Sagan, John Updike and William Thackeray, on death, he seems most like a college freshman desperately trying to hide the fact that he hasn't read the book.

And I would hesitate to show many of Shields' scientific passages to a researcher in the areas he covers -- even my brief perusals of Glamour seem to indicate that many of the items on women, for example, are up for debate. (Descriptions of the degeneration of female sexual and reproductive faculties, incidentally, are exhaustive. None notes the failings of the male apparatus quite so vividly, but some subjects are more difficult to face than death.)