Too Soon to Say Goodbye
by Art Buchwald
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Book Summary Information
Author: Art BuchwaldEdition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-11-07
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of Too Soon to Say Goodbye
Book Review: Holding a Salon in Hospice
Summary: 3 Stars
I never quite "got" Art Buchwald. His humor seemed to always miss the mark for me. Here again, as Buchwald was under hospice care, writing what he thought would be his last random reminiscences - his observations seem too stray, too puzzlingly juxtaposed.
For example, he writes how his attendants and visitors at the residential hospice were spoiling him, waiting on him, delivering greetings and felicitations and presents galore. He said all this doting attention began to turn him into Marlon Brando as that actor whined "I couldda been a contender." Well, I'd never considered that Brando particularly came across as a whiner in that scene from "On the Waterfront."
Or again, Buchwald and his fellow hospice residents started to play their own version of the game, "Who I'd Like to Meet in Heaven." They played "Who I Wouldn't Want to Meet in Heaven." After Buchwald considers his list of dislikes, he wonders what he would do if he does run into these characters up there. He decides he might refuse to give them tickets to any upcoming rock concert. What? This whole train of thought comes off as another non sequitur.
When Buchwald started to speculate on what heaven would actually be like, I hoped finally for some nuggets of wisdom. Buchwald concluded that in Heaven, there would be no taxes - because "paying taxes is hell." That was a let-down. But perhaps that was the point - that there are no profundities that can be delivered about the nature of Heaven, or about the lessons to be learned from terminal illness. But I often felt as if I had to impute points to his humor rather than actually finding them there, ready-made.
At any rate, I stumbled through parts of this book - through remarks that seemed to be slippages along a fault-line. Another passage and there again was another crevice between the two parting sides of his thought - a gap become just a little too wide to leap. So although Buchwald wrote very simple sentences throughout this brief book - I still seemed to end up spending a disproportionately long time reading it.
Nevertheless an ever-affable, sympathetic human being emerges from these pages. His impishly grinning face on the cover draws you in and holds you. He says he loved to flirt outrageously with all the women who visited him in hospice. And he seems to be flirting with the reader. And you can hardly resist. You go hand-in-hand with him through the fractured phases of his youth - through orphanage and foster care - then later through bouts of depression. You emerge with him into the warm glow of celebrity status, with kudos being issued by everyone from French Ambassadors to Kennedy family members to Hollywood stars.
Buchwald does quote some of the truly incisive one-liners he's issued along the way, such as: "Don't commit suicide, because you might change your mind in two weeks." Then there's the sarcastic jolt he'd deliver to college graduating classes: "We've given you a perfect world. Don't screw it up." Or his advice about exercise - he gave up on it because he figured the time he spent exercising exceeded any increase he'd realize in life span.
You will also get a sense from this book of what residential hospice care at its best can be like. For Buchwald, it ended up being an opportunity to hold a salon seven days a week. The best and the brightest all came to say what they thought would be their last farewells to him. In the process, everyone had a jolly good time.
And then there's the boost of the happy ending to this book. Well, it was a temporary happy ending - but that temporariness is all any of us can hope for.
Summary of Too Soon to Say Goodbye
When doctors told Art Buchwald that his kidneys were kaput, the renowned humorist declined dialysis and checked into a Washington, D.C., hospice to live out his final days. Months later, ?The Man Who Wouldn?t Die? was still there, feeling good, holding court in a nonstop ?salon? for his family and dozens of famous friends, and confronting things you usually don?t talk about before you die; he even jokes about them.Here Buchwald shares not only his remarkable experience?as dozens of old pals from Ethel Kennedy to John Glenn to the Queen of Swaziland join the party?but also his whole wonderful life: his first love, an early brush with death in a foxhole on Eniwetok Atoll, his fourteen champagne years in Paris, fame as a columnist syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, and his incarnation as hospice superstar. Buchwald also shares his sorrows: coping with an absent mother, childhood in a foster home, and separation from his wife, Ann.
He plans his funeral (with a priest, a rabbi, and Billy Graham, to cover all the bases) and strategizes how to land a big obituary in The New York Times (?Make sure no head of state or Nobel Prize winner dies on the same day?). He describes how he and a few of his famous friends finagled cut-rate burial plots on Martha?s Vineyard and how he acquired a Picasso drawing without really trying.
What we have here is a national treasure, the complete Buchwald, uncertain of where the next days or weeks may take him but unfazed by the inevitable, living life to the fullest, with frankness, dignity, and humor.
?[Art Buchwald] has given his friends, their families, and his audiences so many laughs and so much joy through the years that that alone would be an enduring legacy. But Art has never been just about the quick laugh. His humor is a road map to essential truths and insights that might otherwise have eluded us.?
?Tom Brokaw
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