Touched by Lightning

Loesser's book is a powerful, collective plaint-a bittersweet sequence of broken love and death songs for everyone who forgets the children, doesn't do the dishes, sleeps with the dog and wants to just once touch something electric before they die. The finality of these obituaries and letters carries with it a catholic understanding for an age unwilling or unable to stop glorifying heartbreaking death and violent love-our impossibly toxic contemporaneousness so thwarted and petty. This penetrating portrait of a disordered and dysfunctional era runs the gamut of loss and dejection-even the horses die without dignity. Terse, pithy language cinches Loesser's tightly wound, universal thread-news staying news indeed. These characters range from insurance executives reeking of cheap airport Bourbon to the sad, desperate children of misfit parents too lost in their own mundane mendacity to properly care for their spawn. They are drug-smuggling grave robbers and geriatric bank robbers, fallen Hollywood starlets and bronco riders and yet so familiar as to be disturbing to the very bone. Each page of this book is a haunting recognition and convincing reminder that if we're not already dead, we're dying.