Finding Oneself in a Coffin

FURNISHING ETERNITY A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life By David Giffels 243 pp. Scribner. $24.Well along in the epic of "Moby-Dick," the master harpooner named Queequeg falls so ill that he is convinced he will die before the whaling ship Pequod returns to land. So he asks the crew's carpenter to build him a coffin. Queequeg lies in it as he slowly recovers, and then puts it to use as a storage chest and a life buoy. Indeed, in one of the novel's most enduring images, that coffin is what the narrator Ishmael clings to in solitarily surviving the Pequod's destruction.David Giffels, in contrast, began his path toward building his coffin in a moment of mordant marital banter. He was accompanying his wife, Gina, to a mortuary to select a coffin for her newly deceased father. Offended at the four-figure cost for most models, Giffels laid his frugal, flippant eyes on a cardboard model costing $75."There it is," he tells Gina. "That's what I want to be buried in."To which she shoots back, "Absolutely not happening."It turns out that the cardboard box is only used for bodies being transported to the crematorium, so Giffels has to amend his plan, and to take it more seriously. Nearing 50, he enlists his 81-year-old father, Thomas, a gifted and compulsive woodworker, to join him in designing and constructing a coffin. As if to underscore the stakes, over the several years that the two men intermittently work on it, David Giffels sees cancer strike his father, and kill both his mother, Donna, and his best friend, John Puglia. "I believed building my coffin," Giffels writes, "could be a way to work through the bafflement of death."He never arrives at quite so neat a resolution, but the effort yields a book that is tender, witty and, like the woodworking it describes, painstakingly and subtly wrought. "Furnishing Eternity" also continues Giffels's unlikely literary career as the bard of Akron, Ohio, the beleaguered factory city where he was born, raised and educated, and where he has set his previous books, including the much-praised essay collection "The Hard Way on Purpose."For better or worse, "Furnishing Eternity" is very much a guys' book. The emotional center rests on Giffels's relationships with his father, a retired civil engineer whose life force exerts itself in the workshop, and with his best friend, partner for bar crawls, rock concerts, road trips and other forms of male bonding. While Giffels pays homage to his mother - a devoted teacher and reader who first stirred his writerly ambitions in boyhood by giving him J.D. Salinger's "Nine Stories" - his wife receives the least depth and intricacy of any major figure in the book.With a writer as talented as Giffels, though, this reader could accept the bromances and the gender essentialism as the prices of an emotionally satisfying narrative. Much as Philip Roth did with glove-making in "American Pastoral" and Walter Harrington did with rabbit-hunting in "The Everlasting Stream," Giffels lovingly but never worshipfully traces the craft of coffin-making, and in so doing lets the essence of himself and his father be revealed through action. Only a very skilled engineer of a writer can transform the fits and starts, the fitted corners and sudden gouges of the assembly process into a kind of page-turning drama. And only a wise writer can resist the temptation to deliver a formulaic epiphany at book's end."Death wasn't interested in teaching me anything," Giffels writes with becoming modesty. "It could only unlock what was already inside. That time is not for wasting, but restlessness does not enhance it. That old friends make best friends. That wisdom is nothing more than a lifetime of mistakes made. That the longer we live, the less certain we are of anything, especially our own selves."