Review: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a funny book. That is, it’s funny-weird and funny-haha.

Throughout this, Mary Roach explores what happens to bodies after death when they are pressed, in various ways, into serving the living.

The concept is outrageous, yet it’s also interesting – compelling even – and Roach knows she’s onto something. Part of her approach here is a latter-day participatory journalism. She doesn’t simply report on what she’s learning, but she talks about her experiences learning it. At her best, she’s great at immersing us in one sort of lab or another. One of the most memorable parts is the way she describes the odor that clings to her shoes after she spends a couple hours in a morgue.

At a funny-weird level, she’s at her best in the early chapters when she explores what seems to me the most obvious examples of her inquiry. She visits cadaver labs, talks with morticians and pathologists, and gives us a tour of what it’s like in the world of scientists and engineers who use dead bodies to measure car tests and develop time-of-death determination techniques. It’s a good and important set of inquiries; however squeamish we may be about using bodies in such fashion, we still benefit from them. One researcher estimates that every cadaver used in car crash studies has saved dozens of lives a year.

The later chapters get a little farther out and, to my thinking, a little less interesting. It’s kooky to read about the researchers who tried to prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin by suspending cadavers in positions that replicated what might have been the dying position of Christ. It’s more stomach-turning to hear about historical instances (and sometimes not so historical) when communities ate humans either “for the taste” or for imagined medicinal reasons.

Even granting the morbidity of the subject, it seems fairly far afield to conflate the original premise of cadaver usage with the less savory non-scientific pre-history of the treatment of dead bodies, While it’s interesting, a part of it feels tangential.

At a funny-haha level, this also starts out funnier than it ends. Roach has a gift for one-liners in context. She makes me laugh – and will probably make most people laugh – and that’s a good thing. In the beginning, she seems to be going about her work – her odd and self-assigned work – and then finding ways of lessening the tension. She’ll go through a strong description of something clinical, and then she’ll uncork a line that reminds us there is a silliness to it all, too.

When she first begins that, it’s effective. Over time, though, her method starts to show through. She’ll telegraph the jokes more than before; some of what she goes into seems like it may be there as much for the opportunity for the jokes as for its legitimate connection to the topic.

Even more, while I did enjoy this throughout, I started to get troubled by her essential capacity for callousness. She’s observational in a Seinfeldian way; she assumes for herself the privilege of making stories about others – about objectifying them. Henry James criticized that impulse a century ago, and it hasn’t become any more appealing. It had a moment 15-20 years ago, a period when it seemed the dominant comic style, but I think comedy has evolved into something else. Put simply, in the age of Trump, it isn’t funny to sit on the sidelines and mock, even if that mockery is as gentle and clever as this is.

So, if this one were half as long as it is, if the method hadn’t started to get old for me, I think I’d have loved it. As it is, I’m still impressed with Roach’s curiosity, humor, and skill. There’s a lot to like about it still, and I think it would have been an even greater pleasure when it first came out.


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