Book review of James Michener's Recessional by Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.)

James Michener's Recessional,
a book review by Kyi May Kaung.

A recessional is music that is played as the congregation leaves the church.

In this novel, published three years before his death at age 90, Michener examines life in a fictional retirement community called The Palms, in Tampa, Florida.

Toward the end of his life, James Michener suffered from kidney disease and at the end of 3 years of daily dialysis, he decided he had lived a full life and stopped dialysis and died.

A full life indeed!

In this penultimate novel (I think the semi-autobiographical novel The Novel was the last), Michener goes deep instead of wide and historical, as in his earlier "country portrait" novels such as Hawaii, Chesapeake, Texas, Mexico, etc.

Though published in 1994, and it is my perception, just by his prolific writing career and the mass of his writings alone, that he wrote pretty fast and efficiently, Michener again demonstrates his incomparable ability to inform as well as entertain, always keeping up an optimistic authorial voice.

Like Mozart's and maybe every other creative person's life, there is an arc to his life and work.

Tales of the South Pacific, made into the Broadway musical South Pacific, was about inter-racial love and yes, racism, as in the superb angry little song "You've got to be taught."  Well, it was by Rogers and Hammerstein, but certainly inspired by Michener's original stories.  In real life, Michener was married to a Japanese woman.

In the "country studies"--Michener "mined" the history of a place, region or country from ancient times to modern, with intertwined or woven, braided stories. 

They never fail to hold my interest, and Michener's novels have enriched my felt experience of places I have been to, such as Poland and Chesapeake, as well as of places I have never been to, and may never see in my lifetime.

It's too bad he grew old and died, so I guess I will just have to try and write historical novels in his style.  But it won't be easy.

Before the success of South Pacific and his segue into full-time writing, Michener was a successful academic, which shows in the rigor of his research and analysis.  It is fiction, but it is never slipshod nor cavalier.  All his characters are rounded and have depth and strength, and some were real people, and some very well could have been.

In The Novel, his "ultimate" and last novel, he described his typical working day:  Get up, comb my hair, sit at my typewriter and write.

He said that he can hold about 40 books in his head at one time, so his novels are like theses, but they are not dry!  Because they are about humans, their loves and hates and desires, and even his villains, such as the Mexican boy in his novel Texas, are memorable, as is his depiction of the Mexican general Santa Ana.

I am sure I would much rather read a Michener novel than a CIA Country Study.

--In Recessional, the story starts with a medical doctor ceasing to practice due to not one but two legal cases, which he lost, even though there was no malpractice on his part.

As Dr. Zorn drives down to Florida to take on a new job as director of the Palms, he runs into a traffic pileup in the winter on I95(??) in which a young woman's feet are sheared off by the bumper of her own car.

A la "Chekov's gun"--if you show it, you must use it later, we know she will reappear in Zorn's life, but she only does so halfway through the book.

The first part is about the mechanics and the inhabitants of the retirement center.

I think there's something prophetic about the way I found this book.  I was helping a friend clear up a "tear down" on Christmas day when I spotted Recessional in the garbage and fished it out. 

If it was the right book for James Michener to write at his age, it certainly is the best book for me to read at my age.

Michener, without being judgmental, examines the "business model" or rather accounting scam that is a retirement community--i.e. you pay a hefty sum to get in, and you surrender your assets such as houses and they undertake to look after you till you die.

This does not sound right, though Michener in his novel assigns blame on no one.

What if they make you die sooner??

Anyway, it sounds much like an annuity which one should never buy, because you give up a large lump sum, for the sake of an income, which means they will invest your money on the stock market and you may lose it all, not to mention having it tied up.  One day I will write a scathing novel called The Annuity.  Never do it, better to have x number of children and hedge your bets that way.

Anyway, The Recessional like all of Michener's books, is highly readable, informative and entertaining.

I've now got to the part where the young lady arrives at the Palms to enter a rehab program --

Copyright Kyi May Kaung  www.kmkaung.com
1-5-2014