Whiteout Conditions, the debut novel of Tariq Shah, presents a narrator on the other side of grief. Having lost pretty much every person he was close to, protagonist Ant emerged inured to loss and suffering. The literal man with nothing left to lose, not so much hardened by his past but freed by it. Liberated from fear of death, both his own and that of anyone else.
The position is manifest in Ant’s main hobby. The attendance, and enjoyment, of funerals. Any funeral, for anybody. His own fear of death lifted, Ant finds the dread inherent to the ceremonies to have evaporated, becoming a service not of grim mystery but familiarity. The comfort of the mundane. “The whole show,” Shah writes, “the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.”
When the younger cousin of Ant’s childhood friend is killed, he finds himself compelled to return to his hometown in Wisconsin after a prolonged absence. The friend, Vince, is unconvinced by his motives, but still collects Ant from O’Hare, and together the pair set off thorough the snow in order to make the service. Only in returning home, Ant is forced to confront that he has not lost everything—a past, a childhood, a network of relationships from which he could never untangle—and that grief can never be truly defanged.
He tries to deflect by settling into the playful macho bickering of his old friendship. He tries to dissociate and pretend that nothing matters. Vince, caught up in his own neuroses, does the same, and the old friends spark against one another as they hurtle towards the final explosion. The result is a farce in which every emotion and motivation is revealed as slightly pathetic. In other words, a farce most human and male. “He really said this to me,” Shah writes towards the end of the narrative. “I couldn’t help giggling a bit. He did too, just before falling to pieces. Everything, and everyone—ridiculous.”
Whiteout Conditions is out now via Two Dollar Radio.
