The Celebrants

“Whoever had chosen this paint color had grossly misfired. There were hundreds of shades to choose from, Jordan thought—Polar Bear, Whisper, Frost, Pure, Swiss, Dove, Cloud, Icicle, Mist, Paper Lace—and this was what the decorator went with? Something that reflects life’s stark impermanency back in your face in the gravest moment of one’s existence?”

Rowley employs vivid imagery to describe the shade of white paint used in the hospital waiting room. The image is comedic in that the names of the paint colors are trite in relation to the news of terminal illness Jordan has received. It also adheres to intense realism in its particular description of “shades” and the “stark” environment, reflecting Jordan’s confrontation with a grim reality.

“They, like every other living thing that drew breath, were already in the throes of dying, used cars losing value the moment they were driven off the lot. And yet here they were at a starting line, comically stretching cold muscles, waiting for the BANG of a starter pistol, not realizing they were twenty-two years into a race that had different finish lines for them all.”

Rowley creates a metaphor of life as a running race, with the finish line representing death. That this is in close proximity to another metaphor—of the human body as a car whose function and value is depreciating—reflects the fact that mortality is difficult to understand, especially for the youthful friends. Describing death through mixed metaphors represents the search to assign meaning to it.

“Marielle had sat and squeezed Alec’s hand; she had done much the same with her grandmother’s a decade earlier in the moments before they closed her casket. A dead hand feels just that. Dead. But her grandmother’s hand had skin that crêped, knuckles that had bent and protruded, and was to the touch ice-cold. Hers was the hand of an old person, who had lived a full life and done many things with palms that were calloused, with skin nearly sloughed off. There was something wrong in holding a hand as smooth as Alec’s, cold as it was, soulless, in that way lifeless things are, but weighty and smooth in other ways that suggested strength and vitality, life force that might still, in some way, squeeze back.”

Rowley presents vivid, corporeal imagery of the differences between Marielle’s grandmother’s hand and Alec’s after their deaths. Rowley thus creates a vivid sensory portrayal that complements the complex idea of what it means to die as an elderly person as opposed to earlier in life.

“[Jordy] began CPR, which he had first learned for a summer job lifeguarding at his community pool; in his head the whole time he was screaming Annie are you okay?, which was what you were supposed to ask of the training dummy—a rubber head and a chest and not much else, which to Jordy always made her seem very not okay at all (Where are your legs, Annie?)”

Rowley includes dark humor in the desperate moment of Jordy trying to revive Alec, which furthers the novel’s thematic idea of The Role of Dark Humor in Coping with Mortality. This passage also uses italicized and parenthetical interjections to represents the experience of incongruous thoughts intervening during moments of stress.

“If Craig had cared about Marielle, truly cared, he would have known that she couldn’t have given [consent]. Not because she was drunk or asleep, although maybe she was a little of both, but rather because she was out of her mind with grief. Craig was still a boy in a man’s body. He didn’t not care about her, she knew this—he would never deliberately cause her harm. So she nodded, slowly, as if she were sure, and that was all the consent Craig needed; he writhed, scrambling to remove his boxers beneath her.”

Rowley addresses sexual consent and the factors that contribute to it in this passage. The idea of Craig as a “boy in a man’s body” indicates his lack of maturity, and the use of the double negative—“didn’t not”—portrays Craig’s ignorance when overlooking enthusiastic consent.

“She had wanted to invite her friends from Berkeley, but she was happy, or so she thought, and they were too close to Alec, both emotionally and to burying him, and she feared they would not understand. They would judge her as they always had, or misunderstand the invitation and assume this wedding was her already invoking their pact. Poor Marielle, the sensitive one, couldn’t hack it out in the world and needed both a man and her friends to come running. They would certainly have had something to say about her being knocked up, and since she was excited about being a mother she didn’t want to hear it.”

Throughout the novel, Rowley employs third-person perspective that changes depending on which character is the current point of focus, usually alongside which funeral is being discussed. This passage shows the inclusion of both Marielle’s perspective and the perspective of her friends, as she views it, within the third-person narration.

“Again, on its own time, the planchette moved. It shot to the upper right corner of the board, startling both Marielle and Jordan, and then lazily fell to the bottom left, where it set up camp, seemingly in no-man’s-land.”

In this passage describing the friends’ experience of attempting to contact Alec using the Ouija board, Rowley employs anthropomorphism to emphasize the uncanny quality of the experience. That the planchette is represented as having its own agency in movements, to move lazily and be able to set up camp, contributes to the supernatural tone of the scene.

“And then she stifled her laughter just as quickly, as she was afraid of Naomi’s wrath. She then wondered why she had a friend she was afraid of, why she kept her, why she valued her. Because, she reasoned. Naomi wasn’t overly concerned with her feelings and therefore would always tell her the truth. Even if the truth was that she needed to release her thoughts. Only then, in thinking of Naomi, did her head begin to quiet.”

Rowley employs unique diction in this passage to represent the complex relationship between Marielle and Naomi; the word “wrath” is unexpectedly histrionic in the context of the commonplace conversation they’re having.

“Verb tense. I’ve run that sentence back and forth in my head and I don’t get it. You have, present, loved, past, me, noun.” Marielle shook her head, as if realizing for the first time that a funeral for a living person was ridiculous, just as the rest of them were finding meaning.”

As Marielle discusses the grammatical issues with a eulogy for a dead person, Rowley employs staccato syntax in the short phrases separated by commas. This stilted, abrupt structure mirrors the difficulty that the characters initially have reconciling their understanding of a typical funeral with the way they’ve chosen to inflect the tradition.

“Thirty-two feet per second, per second. The equation ran through Naomi’s head like a Buddhist chant, something meant to bring comfort (it was math, after all, or physics—what was so terrifying about those?), to lose all meaning until it was just that—a chant—quieting her mind and her soul until all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. Instead it wreaked havoc like a ticker at the bottom of a screen during a gruesome event, growing louder and louder and seemingly faster and faster as it heralded more lives lost, more devastation, more ways in which the world would never quite again be the same.”

Rowley employs parenthetical sentence structure to echo the tangential nature of Naomi’s thoughts. Similarly, the repetition of “louder” and “faster” increases the pace and agitation of the sentence’s tone, which is in alignment with the simile of the gravity equation Naomi is meditating on as a ticker for a traumatic event.

“Naomi was gripping the yoke with such fervor, her knuckles began to turn white. She could feel the sweat growing beneath her palms and took a few deep breaths. To be in control of the aircraft, she had to be in control of herself, and the most important thing was to remain calm. She fanned her fingers out, away from the yoke, while keeping it wrapped in her thumbs. And then, when she re-formed her grip, she had control of it, instead of it having control of her.”

Rowley employs detailed, physical imagery in this passage to represent the physical experience of fear and agitation. Its specificity evokes physical as well as emotional sympathy for Naomi as a character.

“Naomi shoved another chip in her mouth, hoping it would get her to stop crying. But it was not the mild end of the flight but rather the spicy, and her tears doubled until she wondered whether she had the mild or spicy end of their actual flight, and she went back to laughing again. The whole thing was just so absurd.”

Rowley employs a double entendre of flight as meaning a selection (in this case of guacamole) and air travel in this sentence through Naomi’s disjointed thoughts. This contributes to the comedic, absurd tone by portraying an experience of making seemingly tangential mental connections.

“‘But endings are also beginnings,’ she continued. ‘Opportunities for a new life. And so tonight we say goodbye, not only to Fumiko and Takeshi, who were good people, products of their own parenting, their own upbringing, racism, hardship, discrimination, and their own experience of the world. But also to their daughter, Naomi, the daughter who was never enough.’”

This passage inflects the rhetorical form of the eulogy, which is adapted from its usual form twofold: by being given for a living person and by being given by Naomi to herself. The inclusion of multiple justifications for Naomi’s parents’ actions reflects her long process of having attempted to understand them.

“The works themselves certainly looked authentic and he didn’t mean from a first or casual glance. Förg had a unique, surrealist style, creating blurred portraits where every stroke of paint seemed both important and an afterthought. Craig had conducted a near-microscopic study of the brushwork, as well as a careful inventory of the paint itself, as two authenticated Jackson Pollocks that sold through a neighboring gallery had recently been proven fakes (and were the subject of several civil suits) when pigment in the yellow paint had been discovered not to have existed until a good fourteen years after Pollock’s death in a car crash.”

This passage alludes to the motif of art denoting an interplay between reality and representation, particularly with regard to a difficult-to-discern forgery. The paradox of each stroke of paint being both “important and an afterthought” reflects the paradoxical suggestion of a “unique” work being masterfully recreated.

“But every once in a while it was clear the Jordans were a fairy tale, that no one knows every one of another person’s secrets, and he wondered what other mysteries there might be between them through the years. It was one of Alec’s favorite sayings—no two people have ever met—and Jordan suddenly understood what he meant for the first time.”

Alec’s saying is repeated here, having been introduced much earlier in the text. In this way, Rowley allows the reader to participate in the experience of remembering something an old friend previously said along with the characters in the novel.

“‘I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ Mia interjected. ‘I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to say hello. I mean, you’re the funeral people, right?’ ‘Celebrants,’ Jordan said awkwardly. Funeral people felt cold, and not how you’d like to be thought of.”

Jordan’s awkwardness emphasizes the insular and intimate nature of the friendship by contrasting the presence of an outside observer with the comfort of friendship, even within the strange paradigm of living funerals. This passage introduces the titular “celebrants,” which conveys the paradoxical nature of funerals as both mourning events and celebrations of life.

“He was the beating heart of a family, this family, a family of friends, and they continued to give him so much. All this time he thought of their association as it related to death, when in fact the bond he had with these friends had everything to do with life.”

Rowley’s metaphoric representation of Craig as a beating heart evidences his progress away from feeling abandoned and detached. The repetition of the word “family” emphasizes The Closeness of Found Family Despite Periods of Distance.

“And in this moment, under the influence of psychedelics, the very idea of Jordy without Jordan seemed incredibly profound. The world dropped away, except for the desultory sounds, which amplified and grew louder until they were roaring in his ear like a jetliner taking off overhead.”

This passage emphasizes Jordy’s feeling of being lost without his partner, even before his death, because of how intertwined their identities have become. Due to both this preemptive grief and the effect of psychedelics, this feeling is visceral and takes auditory form, which Rowley conveys through the simile of a jetliner taking off. While there are several allusions to plane crashes throughout the novel, this simile suggests new beginnings.

“We were a balanced group in many ways when we formed. Two women, two straight men, two others who found each other. But when we lost Alec, we also lost that balance and in some ways you’ve been without your partner in this friendship, almost since it began. That’s also at times put you at the center of everything. The apex, the balance, the midpoint between two ends.”

In this passage, Rowley conveys the sense of balance or equilibrium in friendship by highlighting the pairings between the group members and the way Alec’s loss upset the balance. The metaphor of Craig as a midpoint visually and spatially represents the fragility of longstanding relationship dynamics.

“No problem. Once you’re gone I’ll sleep my way through the good boroughs before settling down with a nice guy. Against all odds, his name will be Jordan too, but I’ll make our friends call him Also. People will come up to us and say, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about Jordan,’ and I will say ‘Thank you,’ and then turn to my new fella and say ‘This is Also…’ I won’t even have to finish that sentence because it will be so crystal clear and then we’ll all have a good laugh.”

Rowley employs hyperbole (“sleep my way through the good boroughs” and “[a]gainst all odds”) and dark humor in this passage to portray Jordy coping with his reaction to Jordan’s suggestion about what he should do after his husband’s death. The hyperbole both creates a comedic tone and provides detail that addresses Jordy’s complicated feelings about his own identity in relation to his partner’s terminal illness.

“Jordan was at peace, holding this fragile life, and yet oddly disconcerted, as if he had stepped into some sort of Greek play. This blind kitten, an oracle of sorts, calm in his arms because it could sense his strength leaving him. He was not to be feared, as his life was waning, his journey almost through.”

Rowley employs an allusion to a Greek play, and the idea of the kitten as an oracle, to emphasize the uncanny experience that Jordan has as he attempts to resolve his feelings about his impending death. The image of the eyeless kittens is portrayed as paradoxically grotesque and adorable, which is aligned with the incongruous nature of mortality.

“The water was murky, but it began to settle and the sunlight pierced the surface, illuminating just enough of the water below him that he started to see images in the way the light danced with its rays. He saw his old municipal pool, where he first fell in love with swimming, his parents waving from folding metal bleachers. He saw the Berkeley campus from above, like he was swimming over a giant map. That morphed into a Ouija board, then a parachute floating between puffed cotton clouds. He saw Alec and Jordan. Smiling Jordan, young, healthy, cupping his hands together over his mouth to yell his support from the stands and then enthusiastically waving him on. He knew it was the sun playing tricks on him, or aerobic respiration kicking in and mental and physical exhaustion. He didn’t care; There were lessons to be drawn from each of these images, each of their funerals: to live in the present, to live for yourself, and that we were never as alone as we thought.”

While Jordan’s partner is the one dying, Rowley represents Jordy as having an experience of his life—centering on the events of the novel—flashing before his eyes. After the representation of Jordy seeing the shadow of the shark produced an ominous tone and feeling of suspense, the progression through images of various parts of life produces a quick progression toward the resolution of the novel with the message of living “in the present,” as vivid memories propel him toward shore.

“You were a swimmer in college, and you are a swimmer still. I was an artist in college, but for so long I told myself it was something I had outgrown. Put too much distance between that version of me and the man I am today. But we are still capable of amazing things, and we are not so old that past versions of ourselves are long gone. There is fire in us still.”

This passage’s quick progression from Craig’s assessment of Jordy’s identity to his assessment of his own suggests the closeness of the friends and the fact that their trajectories of rediscovering their identities are similar. The idea of versions of self also suggests the complexity and changing nature of selfhood.