I'm going through some sort of New Orleans/Hurricane Katrina obsession phase, where I want to learn everything I can about the city, its people and the storm. I picked up this book a few months ago, in one of my typical book buying frenzies, and it had been in my on-deck stack. I was just starting it when I learned my sister was moving to New Orleans. Serendipity is a word I hate, but it seems to fit here. After finishing this, I bumped When The Levees Broke, a Spike Lee joint, to the top of my Netflix queue. So anyways, here's the review of 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, by Chris Rose.
Having just finished God Save the Fan, I was leery of starting another book that was basically a collection of personal essays on one topic. I wanted to be told a story, to be rewarded for the time I was investing. But after one plane ride and sixty pages, I was hooked.
The book is a collection of Chris Rose's articles, originally written for the Times-Picayune, a New Orleans newspaper. And it wasn't at all what I expected. I thought I'd have to wade through story after story about WHY things went wrong and WHO was to blame and HOW this could have been prevented, etc. Though there are traces of these themes laced throughout his stories, he didn't use his column as a forum for complaining about logistics and tactics. Instead, he told stories. Stories about people. Little moments that let you know that New Orleans wasn't just about the number of people displaced or dead, but it was about the actual people, one at a time.
Even his story about trying to decide what to name the book is telling of life after Katrina. 1 Dead in Attic: After a phrase he saw spraypainted on a house in the city's 8th ward. Simple, true and terrifying to think about. Your mother or great aunt dying alone in her attic. And no one to come get her. You just have to scrawl your message on her collased home and hope that eventually someone will give her a dignified burial. He writes this about a title he almost used instead:
"I was preparing a follow-up to 1 Dead in Attic, another collection of stories that I was going to call Purple Upside-Down Car, a declarative observation my four-year-old son made from our car during a tour of the Lower 9th Ward that I clung to as the perfect metaphor for the whole of New Orleans, not just some wasted, toppled vehicle lying in a field of debris down on -- get this -- Flood Street.
The irony in this place could kill you."
Each and every story touches you in some way and brings you vividly into New Orleans as Rose saw it post Katrina. Stories about people, about refrigerators, about love and loss, about sports and steaks. His tales are heartwarming and heartbreaking, humorous and depressing, endearing and frightening. The writing is conversational, yet elegant. I put down the book feeling like I knew the people, the city, the sorrow and the hope of New Orelans. What more can you ask for?
