Review: What happens when a man accidentally writes his own obituary?

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right moment in life, aligning with what’s happening and offering eye-opening commentary. John Kenney’s “I See You’ve Called in Dead” is that book.

It’s not a self-help guide, although it sometimes reads like one, or a “Hallmark card,” as protagonist Bud Stanley says to his best friend Tim — a bit of a guru in a wheelchair — while they sit in a church after a funeral. The book is, instead, a reminder that we’re all going to die, but we don’t live as if we know it.

Bud ought to know. He’s an obituary writer, after all, who has penned 724 in the years he has worked for United World Press. In that time he’s learned “that you are more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark” and “that you can be declared dead in some states in the United States but considered alive in others.”

Despite how morbid it might sound, Bud advocates thinking about what you would write in your own obituary as an exercise in figuring out who you are and what truly matters: “Because it’s your life and there’s still time to write it. Before I have to.”

Then he makes the supreme mistake of writing his own. Late at night. After a really bad blind date, an email from his ex-wife and a drink or two or three of 16-year-old Lagavulin whisky.

“Bud Stanley, the first man to perform open-heart surgery on himself, died today in a hot air balloon accident,” he begins, and then shifts gears, choosing to go with this whopper: “Bud Stanley, one of the original Pips for Gladys Knight, has died. At the hands of terrorists.” By the time he’s done with his obituary, Bud has married four to nine times and included a career as a soft-core porn script doctor.

In a moment of whisky-induced insanity, he posts the obit to the news outlet’s website. The fallout is immediate.

“I See You’ve Called in Dead” is irreverent about death but that doesn’t mean Kenney isn’t serious about it. Bud may go through life dishing out sarcasm, but he’s a man in pain — and he doesn’t seem to recognize it, although everyone else in his orbit does. Bud narrates his story, but it’s the conversations in “I See” that are most enlightening, especially those between Bud and Tim. As a man who has reckoned with an accident that left him paralyzed, Tim’s insights are particularly poignant.

To further make a point or, most often, to add humor, Kenney includes movie parallels: an “I got better” nod to a scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” for instance, and a literal call-out to “Harold and Maude”:

“How incredibly weird,” a co-worker responds to Bud’s recounting of meeting a woman, dressed in thrift-store finds, who sells him on the beauty of going to the funerals of strangers. “Like ‘Harold and Maude.’”

Bud, of course, also shares the first name of actor Bud Cort, who starred as Harold.

Although it’s darkly funny, more than a little sad and occasionally downright tragic, “I See You’ve Called in Dead” is never cheesy, thank god. I held my breath as I read, though, worried that the novel would turn a platitudinous corner where disappointment awaited. But I needn’t have been concerned.

The bit of my life required to read “I See You’ve Called in Dead” was time well spent.

I See You’ve Called in Dead

By: John Kenney.

Publisher: Zibby Books, 296 pages, $27.99.