Older and less brilliant in his new book, "Obituaries," William Saroyan is still defying the rules, still the daring young man on the flying trapeze. Characteristically, this latest performance has a bit of the stunt in it, like a pie-eating contest or a six-day bicycle race. It might even be described as a death-defying leap, for "Obituaries" is a book about death. Its pretext—and here is the stunt—is that Mr. Saroyan will write about each of the 200 or so names listed in the Necrology section of Variety's annual review of the year 1976. Reading through the names, Mr. Saroyan discovered that he had known 28 of them; the others are strangers….

Mr. Saroyan considers each name in turn, letting it trigger a flood of reminiscences, thoughts, digressions, observations, paeans, sour notes and epiphanies. He keeps at it day after day, standing at his desk, typing away. He is like a man on an exercycle logging the words like miles on his odometer, his imagination providing the changing scenery, a kind of stream-of-consciousness travelogue projected on a screen in his mind, like the movies of an unwinding road that driver trainees watch in their mockup cars. But he keeps always in mind the end of the road we are all heading for—death.

Speed is uppermost, for all the disgressions. He refuses to pause to look up an occasional spelling he is unsure of, or the title of a movie. "I'll be damned if I'm going to hang around standing above my small portable Royal typewriter," he confides in us, "waiting forever for a more apt turn of language…." He is striving to keep the momentum up; as he glances in the rearview mirror he sees the past—and time—gaining on him. But there is a fitness, a rightness in movement itself that makes it more desirable than precision or elegance of expression…. (p. 7)

All the while he keeps up the monologue, like a man who has the floor in a saloon and won't give it up. Like the idea of movement, this is another tactic—a filibuster about and against death. "Why am I writing this book?" he asks. "To save my life, to keep from dying, of course. That is why we get up in the morning." The alarm is a daily resurrection—and not an entirely welcome one, which suggests that death is a not entirely hateful condition to some deeper part of our being. Another tactic is keeping things…. [He] confesses that he is something of a hoarder himself: "What is keeping? It is not dying, that's what it is."

And so the man on the exercycle keeps at it, the words and names and memories popping up on the odometer and disappearing, but death always in the background. He remembers the first time he was aware of death, as a little boy…. He thinks of other later deaths (but never, curiously, of those in his own family), and he allows the names of total strangers on Variety's necrology to loose another train of thought. The meditations thus provoked sometimes fall flat; he can't keep coming up with meaningful digressions related to the names of total strangers. Yet the method constructs a paradigm of our relationship with deaths around us. "We connect through connections," he says; the private deaths of those we love and the public deaths of strangers act as tributaries leading us to a common pool of humanity.

Mr. Saroyan's ultimate affirmation is of "the joyous sameness of death and life … what a thing it is to be alive, what a thing it is to remember death, to know it is there, man, and how it is there." He abandons form to immerse himself in content, a flow of words, memories, pictures, a Joycean stream of consciousness, "for that is the way we live the way we stay alive….

"Obituaries" is a book composed as a life is lived, messy, trivial, spiteful at times, touching and outgoing, just flowing on, reaching completion, defying the darkness all about. (p. 49)