What do you think?
Rate this book
Tombstone: Not a Western
Not a Western is a comic novel about the funerary business. It begins with its two protagonists, Robert and Marsha Bernstein, making their arrangements. Cremation versus interment are debated with a mortician at a prominent Manhattan funeral home. Wills and trusts are complicated by a financial scandal which lands Robert and Marsha at El Rancho de Campo, an all-inclusive resort in Tombstone, Arizona, catering to those whose concerns lie with the afterlife and where graveyards and golf courses collide. Comedy and spirituality go hand in hand as Robert and Marsha haplessly negotiate their way to the hereafter.
204 pages, Paperback
Published April 19, 2018
4 people want to read
About the author
Francis Levy
7 books14 followersFrancis Levy (born March 28, 1948) is the author of the comic novels Erotomania: A Romance, published by Two Dollar Radio in 2008 and subsequently translated in a Spanish edition by Tusquets Editores in 2009, and Seven Days in Rio, published by Two Dollar Radio in 2011. Levy is also the co-founder of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination. He has been profiled in The East Hampton Star, AIGA Voice, Nerve.com, and elsewhere.
Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, a satirical examination of compulsive sexuality, was a Queerty Top 10 Book of 2008 and named a Standout Book of the Year by Inland Empire Weekl. Erotomania was reviewed in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Time Out Chicago and elsewhere. Levy's short stories, poems, criticism, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, and Evergreen Review. The journal American Imago published a long autobiographical essay about Levy's psychoanalytic treatment entitled "Psychoanalysis: The Patient’s Cure” in its Spring 2010 issue. Levy blogs as The Screaming Pope.
Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, a satirical examination of compulsive sexuality, was a Queerty Top 10 Book of 2008 and named a Standout Book of the Year by Inland Empire Weekl. Erotomania was reviewed in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Time Out Chicago and elsewhere. Levy's short stories, poems, criticism, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, and Evergreen Review. The journal American Imago published a long autobiographical essay about Levy's psychoanalytic treatment entitled "Psychoanalysis: The Patient’s Cure” in its Spring 2010 issue. Levy blogs as The Screaming Pope.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 19, 2020
Only Francis Levy could deal with aging, depression, dissolution, and death and make it funny. He looks into the abyss of our disappointments, neuroses and failures and finds it hilarious, and so does the reader as long as he or she is held in his spell. Thoroughly original.
September 11, 2018
Robert Bernstein is a horny, aging Manhattanite determined to put his affairs in order before kicking the bucket. First and foremost, he wants to decide whether to get buried alongside his wife, Marsha, or cremated. As part of the decision-making process, he tries out designer caskets and shrouds, nearly strikes up an extramarital affair with a funeral home director, and fantasizes about gym-equipped mausoleums where visitors can simultaneously stay in shape while paying their respects. Robert also manages to somehow lose the family fortune to an arcane financial instrument that brings to mind the heady days of 2008. Notwithstanding their looming penury, Robert and Marsha visit El Rancho de Campo, an all-inclusive resort in Tombstone, Arizona that specializes in helping the living prepare for death with seminars like “Weightlifting for Pallbearers". The couple has always had a contentious relationship; trying to “make arrangements” brings their decades-old acrimony to a head.
Francis Levy’s latest novel is one of his funniest yet, but probably not for you if you’re faint of heart, politically correct or prefer not to hear about God’s girth. It’s hard to keep a straight face with lines like, “When they say your whole life flashes by when you die, they mean everything. Even Chinese take-out orders flashed through my mind.” He conjures up a surreal but believable universe where Charon sports a name tag, rigor mortis is a means to prolonging your sex life with your dearly departed, and wheelchairs and walking canes are used in the bedroom to spice things up. If you’ve read “Erotomania", Mr. Levy’s first novel about sex, sex, and more sex, then once again you'll be forced to breathlessly keep up with a kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic vision that synthesizes literary, filmic, financial, funerary, and psychoanalytical references in a work held together by a simple question that nags us all: “How do I prepare for death?”
While Mr. Levy's’ latest novel is by turns both comedic and pornographic, it’s the philosophical and poetic moments that give it soul. He masterfully braids together the profane and sublime. In between getting it on behind gravestones with Marsha, Robert has some very real epiphanies about his spouse that all of us in doomed marriages can relate to. There is, for example, the moment when he realizes, “When you know someone a long time, the little traits that have always been annoying can be endearing;” or when Robert suddenly feels “a burst of love for the creature I’d spent my life torturing”. Then there are moments of bittersweet lyricism, like when Robert relates, “We are just specks, like those shooting stars you see in the sky on a summer night, only less bright, less important and even more short-lived.” One gets the sense that the protagonist's rampant libido and failed attempts at getting laid are just ways to temporarily numb himself to the hard questions he faces about faith, marriage, and his underwhelming legacy. Hidden in Mr. Levy’s book are little tips and prescriptions about living and dying that everyone can take to their (death)bed. The ending to Mr. Levy’s story is both open-ended and touching, a final flourish that serves as counterpoint to all the gallows humor preceding it.
Francis Levy’s latest novel is one of his funniest yet, but probably not for you if you’re faint of heart, politically correct or prefer not to hear about God’s girth. It’s hard to keep a straight face with lines like, “When they say your whole life flashes by when you die, they mean everything. Even Chinese take-out orders flashed through my mind.” He conjures up a surreal but believable universe where Charon sports a name tag, rigor mortis is a means to prolonging your sex life with your dearly departed, and wheelchairs and walking canes are used in the bedroom to spice things up. If you’ve read “Erotomania", Mr. Levy’s first novel about sex, sex, and more sex, then once again you'll be forced to breathlessly keep up with a kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic vision that synthesizes literary, filmic, financial, funerary, and psychoanalytical references in a work held together by a simple question that nags us all: “How do I prepare for death?”
While Mr. Levy's’ latest novel is by turns both comedic and pornographic, it’s the philosophical and poetic moments that give it soul. He masterfully braids together the profane and sublime. In between getting it on behind gravestones with Marsha, Robert has some very real epiphanies about his spouse that all of us in doomed marriages can relate to. There is, for example, the moment when he realizes, “When you know someone a long time, the little traits that have always been annoying can be endearing;” or when Robert suddenly feels “a burst of love for the creature I’d spent my life torturing”. Then there are moments of bittersweet lyricism, like when Robert relates, “We are just specks, like those shooting stars you see in the sky on a summer night, only less bright, less important and even more short-lived.” One gets the sense that the protagonist's rampant libido and failed attempts at getting laid are just ways to temporarily numb himself to the hard questions he faces about faith, marriage, and his underwhelming legacy. Hidden in Mr. Levy’s book are little tips and prescriptions about living and dying that everyone can take to their (death)bed. The ending to Mr. Levy’s story is both open-ended and touching, a final flourish that serves as counterpoint to all the gallows humor preceding it.
July 3, 2018
Confronted with an announcement of death, many traditional housewives cook. Francis Levy reacts to the subject of death by making a salad. His ingredients are words, and his dish is a celebration of American comedic techniques that convey his message to readers of many ages. The concoction offers a little something for everyone—waftings of nativist herbal miasma mingle with pungent shots of borscht. Nuggets of wisecrack punctuate unstoppable rivulets of Manhattan monologue. While the ground Levy travels is not entirely unexplored, following the unique pathway he builds from comedy strategies running from burlesque to blogpost is the most fun in this very funny novel. The message is: since we’re all going to die, there comes a point where all we can do is laugh. If Jessica Mitford had ever spent time under the boardwalk with Milton Berle, the result would have looked a lot like TOMBSTONE.
The Bernsteins are stereotypical characters right off the shelf marked BELLOW to UPDIKE to ROTH—secular New Yorkers unhappily climbing the precarious ladder of social and material advancement that will ring familiar with anyone within dreaming distance of 96th Street. Their lives depend on emulating and just slightly outpacing their equally competitive neighbors and friends. This is a world where what other people are doing matters intensely; and Levy takes up their story at the point where what other people are doing is getting ready to die. Here the stereotypes begin to crack—just as the Bernsteins believe they will be a major source of stability and direction. Financial scandal brings the ladder of success crashing down. Traditional values vanish like snowflakes, and 96th Street disappears into a far wider world. And a husband and wife who have taken their lives and each other for granted have to cope with who they really are and what they truly value.
Levy has a taste for making uncomfortable subjects more acceptable through humor, and, if one joke doesn’t get you, another will crack you up. Readers of TOMBSTONE can be expected to react in a lot of different ways. Some may say that death is serious and humor is in bad taste. Others are likely to go back to their desks to dig up the estate planner’s phone number with a suppressed giggle or two. With luck, more will take another look at the people and parts of their lives that matter most and seek to enjoy the smiles and laughs to be found there.
The Bernsteins are stereotypical characters right off the shelf marked BELLOW to UPDIKE to ROTH—secular New Yorkers unhappily climbing the precarious ladder of social and material advancement that will ring familiar with anyone within dreaming distance of 96th Street. Their lives depend on emulating and just slightly outpacing their equally competitive neighbors and friends. This is a world where what other people are doing matters intensely; and Levy takes up their story at the point where what other people are doing is getting ready to die. Here the stereotypes begin to crack—just as the Bernsteins believe they will be a major source of stability and direction. Financial scandal brings the ladder of success crashing down. Traditional values vanish like snowflakes, and 96th Street disappears into a far wider world. And a husband and wife who have taken their lives and each other for granted have to cope with who they really are and what they truly value.
Levy has a taste for making uncomfortable subjects more acceptable through humor, and, if one joke doesn’t get you, another will crack you up. Readers of TOMBSTONE can be expected to react in a lot of different ways. Some may say that death is serious and humor is in bad taste. Others are likely to go back to their desks to dig up the estate planner’s phone number with a suppressed giggle or two. With luck, more will take another look at the people and parts of their lives that matter most and seek to enjoy the smiles and laughs to be found there.
November 1, 2018
Tombstone is one of the best novels I've read in several years, and definitely the funniest. As in, laughing out loud with tears streaming down my face. It's that good. I had to read it slowly, one chapter at a time, because a recovery period is required. But there is much more to this novel than the laughter to be found on every page — it’s truly a philosophical exploration of our anxieties concerning death. Our need for ritual, our sense of legacy, the desire for an afterlife or the fear that there will be nothing…all of these questions are plumbed to their depths with an irreverence that is likely unprecedented in literature, all set against the culture of Vegas-like commercialization that defines our modern culture and exposing how our New Age conceits amplify and trivialize these issues. Sure, other writers have broached these topics, perhaps sticking in a toe or two and watching the ripples. But Levy spring-boards right into that dark pool and does a cannonball. And if you’ve ever heard a thing or two about death being an aphrodisiac, this novel will explore that for you on a whole new level as well. My takeaway from Tombstone is that laughter overcomes fear, and death is the funniest part of life.
December 7, 2018
An absolutely hilarious story from beginning to end, a hybrid of Beckett and Bukowski, Tombstone: Not a Western, puts me in mind of Wittgenstein when he said, “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” It's hard not to go a few pages without both laughing and being dazzled by Levy's philosophical insights. In this way, the novel is truly unique. It is a book that I read fast while wishing I had read it slower, the insights blazing from the pages like lightning, illuminating our fears, desires, sadness and hope... It is a book to savor, share and discuss. Tombstone is that rare book that I look forward to reading again.
July 1, 2018
Tombstone: Not a Western follows a couple in their 60s as they get caught up in the world of estate planning and pre-planned funeral arrangements. Everything is complicated by the unexpected news that they're bankrupt, and by their long-standing disagreement over the issue of burial versus cremation. However, the plot was a thin and somewhat absurd and satirical vehicle for the musings of the protagonist on life, death, marriage, middle age, and sex. While the book wasn't necessarily bad, it definitely was not my cup of tea.
May 9, 2018
Well unfortunately this book was not to my taste in novels. Maybe it just is hitting me at a time when I cannot laugh at death, I did want to. Too many funerals happening in my world and elderly parents and friends. So though I wanted to be able to laugh in the face of death and though I realized this was supposed to be funny, I just could not find the humor in this plot.
done-with
June 12, 2018I tried repeatedly to get into this, but was just NOT succeeding. I really love the concept, but the writing just did not resonate with me. I've picked it up and put it down a handful of times; each time I manage a few more pages, but it never grabs me enough to keep reading past that. I'm afraid this may just not be the book for me...
My review copy was provided by Meryl Zegarek Public Relations, Inc.
My review copy was provided by Meryl Zegarek Public Relations, Inc.
July 2, 2018
Tombstone: Not a Western is a well written book and interesting read about planning for death. The story follows Robert and Marsha as they debate wills and trusts, cremation, funerals and explore the afterlife. I wanted to like this story because the concept is solid, but some of the musings and ephiphanies of the two main characters seemed cliche, and I just did not find the characters relatable.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews