We all know the work of Daniel Wallace: six novels, usually comic, beginning with “Big Fish,” and a charming children’s book, “The Cat’s Pajamas.” This new book, nonfiction, is also gracefully written (Wallace is incapable of writing an ugly sentence) but the tone, the voice, while personal and pleasing, is mostly serious business. The subject of this study or biography, or whatever one chooses to call it, is William Nealy, Wallace’s brother-in-law, six years older, his mentor and friend.
Wallace stresses throughout that Nealy was, to him and many others, a kind of superhero, comparing him to Clint Eastwood for cool, Ernest Hemingway for his capacity to master dangerous new enterprises. Nealy built his own house, became an expert at mountain climbing, in-line skating, mountain biking, wild river kayaking and canoeing. He was a cartoonist and a writer, a map maker. He published a number of books, books he wrote after mastering some area of adventure, and illustrated them himself. He was, in his world, famous. It cost him: Nealy had injuries, a bad back, was in pain a good deal, but tireless in his adventures.
Daniel, meanwhile, was a young man largely without direction. He had changed colleges, not graduated, did not want to join his father’s import business even though he worked at it for three years in Japan which was, he admits, fun. Being with William, watching William, inspired Daniel himself to become a cartoonist, and after a long apprenticeship, with five unpublished novels, a world famous and best-selling author. He was understandably horrified when, in 2001, at age 48, William took his own life, in a sense deserting Daniel and unforgivably deserting his wife, Daniel’s sister Holly, who suffered terribly from rheumatoid arthritis and needed William’s constant and devoted care. The shock and the anger are palpable.
Determined to understand what happened, Daniel studies William’s life. He finds and reads his journals, in which William had, for years, written of his depression, revealing a dark inner life. He was sometimes on the brink of suicide and then, finally, with careful forethought and planning, did go through with it, leaving more than a note—a kind of manifesto. It seems that all the beer and marijuana, the frantic activity—climbing up the mountains and roaring down the rivers—was a way of concentrating outward, a way of avoiding looking inwards, because the depression was always there. Of course, Daniel and the reader wonder, is there something that could have been done? Could this have been prevented?
David Brooks recently wrote in the “New York Times” about the suicide of his friend and concluded all you can do is assure your friend that you are there for him. Reminding him of his fine life and accomplishments will not help. He won’t believe you. William could not convince himself that he was worthy of continuing to live. Daniel couldn’t have either, but he has done a heroic job here of trying to understand what we finally cannot know.
