Life / Insurance

by Tara Deal

The narrator of this spare novella is a collage artist trying to piece together a life. Her husband is a composer who is unable to talk. Even so, she keeps asking him questions, trying to figure out what he can remember, what he did, what he wants, what he means. But then she, in turn, is interrogated by the authorities, who want to know what happened here. Everyone waits for answers. How to compensate for this disaster? What are the chances of survival? Is there solace in converting life into language? What to believe? In prose that is sometimes suspenseful, sometimes meditative, sometimes provocative, LIFE / INSURANCE is a portrait of an artist confronting the problems of existence, knowledge, language, and New York City.

110 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 10, 2024

About the author

Tara Deal is a New York writer of fiction, free verse, and urban fragments. Her forthcoming novella, Life / Insurance, won the 2022 Fugere Book Prize from Regal House. She is also the author of the award-winning novellas That Night Alive (Miami University Press) and Palms Are Not Trees After All (Texas Review Press).

Find her online at www.taradeal.com.

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Deal's work, so am not surprised that I absolutely loved this brief novel. Lit fiction at its best. It's hard to describe and hard to get across the precision and originality and intelligent questions this author asks.

It's about art, about memory, but mostly, its about the complexity of a collage artist and a musician trying to carve out a life together. There is subtle competition, and perhaps a darker force. What appears to be a beautiful, loving relationship at times reveals what is possibly a sinister undertone.

We only get the voice of the narrator, who may be unreliable. Deal eventually leaves that to the reader to decide. But it adds to the mystery and almost thriller aspect, as the book consists of the female narrator "speaking" to her partner, who is paralyzed and in a coma after falling down stairs in Venice.

Deal understands being an artist as she's one herself. This is a book of prose fragments that mirror the collages the narrator creates herself.

It's about the permanence of art. Is music permanent or does it "evaporate" like cotton candy? What of the narrator's art, when the glue holding it all together starts to fail?

And what about art's importance? What good is it, she asks, "If you can't cling to it in an emergency, like a cushion for flotation?"

This all parallels their relationship, and even their very lives.

It's also about the impermanence of memory, which constantly shifts in her narration.

I loved the travel memories, so evocative and rich, and this messy love story.

Highly rec to lit lovers and lovers of briefer works.

I want a novel from Deal now!

[Carolyn Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many of us, a hospital room becomes a crossroads. For the woman at the center of Tara Deal’s unsettling and scalpel-sharp novella, “Life/Insurance,” time in that room also becomes a cross-examination of her relationship with the bandaged and incapacitated man – her partner – who silently lies on the bed by which she sits, questioning. The stream of unanswered queries she poses to him and herself slowly dissect their life together until the tissue of that life seems to fray. Unsentimentally and yet powerfully, it reveals its secret parts: raw and mysterious, unknowably tough and fragile and complex – the inner workings of human bonds. This is a life-and-death story, masterfully told.

[Darryl Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It opens in a hospital room in New York, where a woman waits for her husband to talk to her. They have just returned from Venice, where there was an accident, and now he can’t or won’t communicate. What happened anyway? Who is he? Who are they? While she sits, holding only a necklace, I sat with her, unable to put the book down.