Book of the week: Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

(Twelve, $23)

Even coming from Christopher Hitchens, the vow seemed to describe “an impossible, blustery task,” said Katie Roiphe in Slate.com. Shortly before he was diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer, Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22, of wanting, when death came for him, to “look it in the eye.” In the months ahead, he would come “astonishingly close” to doing just that. The core of the slender volume Mortality collects the powerful dispatches he wrote for Vanity Fair from “Tumorland”—the world of the cancer-stricken that healthy people can’t see. Hitchens entered that realm in June 2010, when wracking pain compelled him to seek a hospital diagnosis. Right up through the final fragments he jotted down before the disease took him last December, this charming contrarian wrote with “unnerving directness” about rapidly losing the cognitive and constitutional powers by which he had so forcefully lived.

Not all of his powers failed him, said Trevor Quirk in Harper’s. If you’re looking for the Hitchens who “hurls denouncements at religious institutions and scoffs at being the subject of your prayers, rest assured he’s here.” News that the fervent atheist had fallen ill goaded adversaries to proclaim the cancer “God’s revenge” and to anticipate a deathbed conversion. Hitchens’s response was to mock his supposed punisher for unimaginatively giving him, a chronic smoker, the ailment his lifestyle had predicted. As for the conversion, it never came. Still, “you start to notice in Mortality an eerie tendency for Hitchens to ascribe intent to his disease,” even regularly characterizing his cancer as a “torturer.” That tendency made me wonder if any of us can truly deny the search for meaning outside ourselves.

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But he never succumbed to self-pity, said Christopher Buckley in The New York Times. Like much else he wrote, the seven polished chapters in this book are “diamond-hard and brilliant.” The “heart-wrenching” fragments he wrote during his final days read differently, like “messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep the engines going.” There’s nothing resembling the “terror of oblivion” here, “but there is a keen and great regret at having to leave the party early.” For Hitchens’s friends, myself among them, it’s a comfort to see that “his mordant wit did not desert him” as he stared death in the eye. “What a coda. What a life.”