What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death

by Douglas Bauer

What is life about but the continuous posing of the questions: what happens next, and what do we make of it when it arrives? In these highly evocative personal essays, Douglas Bauer weaves together the stories of his own and his parents’ lives, the meals they ate, the work and rewards and regrets that defined them, and the inevitable betrayal by their bodies as they aged.

His collection features at its center a long and memory-rich piece seasoned with sensory descriptions of the midday dinners his mother cooked for her farmer husband and father-in-law every noon for many years. It’s this memoir in miniature that sets the table for the other stories that surround it—of love and bitterness, of hungers served and denied. Good food and marvelous meals would take on other revelatory meanings for Bauer as a young man, when he met, became lifelong friends with, and was tutored in the pleasures of an appetite for life by M. F. K. Fisher, the century’s finest writer in English on “the art of eating,” to borrow one of her titles.


The unavoidable companion of the sensual joys of food and friendship is the fragility and ultimately the mortality of the body. As a teenager, Bauer courted sports injuries to impress others, sometimes with his toughness and other times with his vulnerability. And as happens to all of us, eventually his body began to show the common signs of wear—cataracts, an irregular heartbeat, an arthritic knee. That these events might mark the arc of his life became clear when his mother, a few months shy of eighty-seven, slipped on some ice and injured herself.


In these clear-eyed, wry and graceful essays, Douglas Bauer presents with candor and humor the dual calendars of his own mortality and that of his aging parents, evoking the regrets and affirmations inherent in being human.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays

160 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2013

About the author

I’ve written three novels, Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans, each of them set in small towns, in Upstate New York, in Texas, and in Iowa. Their subjects and interests are as varied as their settings, although reviewers have pointed out that they all concern themselves in some fashion with mothers’ unpredictable presences and absences and the effect of that unreliability on their sons.

I’ve also written two non-fiction books, Prairie City, Iowa and The Stuff of Fiction. The first covers a year of reunion with the tiny farm village of the title, where I was raised and to which I returned at the age of 30 in order to try to understand the place where I grew up and, not incidentally, some things about myself as I reached that critical age. The second is a series of essays devoted to the craft of fiction writing. The essays cover the elements of character creation, dialogue, narrative strategies, how to start and end a story, and many more. There are exercises accompanying the essays.

In addition to the books I’ve written, I’ve edited two anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on their favorite television shows; and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. These anthologies feature contributions from some of the most prominent writers of our time, including Sue Miller, Andre Dubus III, Aimee Bender, Richard Russo, Claire Messud, Nick Hornby, the late and very great Barry Hannah, and on and on.

My stories and essays have appeared through the years in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, Tin House, The New York Times Magazine and Sunday Book Review, The Massachusetts Review, Agni, and other publications.

I’ve received grants in both fiction and non-fiction from The National Endowment for the Arts.

I’ve taught at several colleges and universities, including Harvard, Smith, The University of New Mexico, Rice, and since 2005 at Bennington College. My courses there include literature classes in the works of Charles Dickens, my favorite author in the language, as well as Twentieth Century writers such as Willa Cather, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Reviews

[Alex Diaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted very desperately to find this book revelatory and hard-hitting, but I'm afraid the hype didn't quite catch up with the book in this instance. Mr. Bauer does an excellent job of examining and ultimately uniting the difficulties of his present life (the death of his mother, his own aging, etc.) with memories of his childhood. The essays in this book examine the quaintness of a rural upbringing, the burdens of aging, his parents' relationship, all with a down-to-earth ease and an impressive amount of attachment. Unfortunately, at least for me, I ultimately found myself putting this book down more often than picking it up, and ended up reading three other books in the process of putting off finishing this one. I can only hope that I'm wrong on this one.

Overall Rating: Probably best for the nostalgic fireside reading sesh, full with bubble-smoking pipe and velvet robe.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Remembrances of life and death of parents and loved ones and parallels to his own life.
Heard the author at the Boston Book Festival and book sounded better than it was for me. There were parts that were beautifully written and other parts that put me to sleep because it was so badly phrased and boring. Had to put this book aside to read something that interested me more but just had to finish it.

[Talbot Hook · Rating 4 out of 5]

2016: Well-woven, recurring narrative aspects, with a blended voice of self-deprecation, humility, and pride, all reflecting the life of those of us who attempt to balance our Midwestern upbringing with more global, universal dreams.

It proved a very charming read, contemplative and gentle.

2024: Perhaps I appreciated certain elements more this time around, but I still feel (as I did in 2016) that the last half of the book (specifically the final couple of essays) falls quite flat. The opening essays are strong, coherent, and form a passage through life and memory that is quite honest and beautiful. The essays at the end feel merely there to pad out the book. That said, the quality of Bauer's writing is definitely something to note, at times whimsical, wry, and charming.

[David Radavich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection of linked memoirs - a genre I always thought I hated. But Douglas Bauer's language is so polished, the evocations so rich and thoughtful, that I was won over completely. The author manages to balance his Iowa upbringing and subsequent worldly sophistication perfectly, and without pretension. This is a book many of us wish we could write and certainly can value reading.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflections of a man after the death of his mother with snippets of his life and his parents. I enjoyed his writing style but the meandering style just unraveled at the end and I was left wondering what point he was trying to make.