Lucas Mann pens a memoir of his older brother who died young and discovers the sadness and beauty in remembering a life cut short
Lucas Mann’s older brother Josh died of a heroin overdose when Lucas was 13. Mann was just old enough to fully experience the grief of losing him but was too young to really know or remember what Josh was like. That contradiction has shaped the way Mann set out to write about his brother in his book, “Lord Fear.” He interviewed people who knew Josh from childhood on. Then he created a series of dramatized, half-imagined anecdotes that give glimpses of Josh at various ages. It’s less a memoir than a kind of literary docu-drama.
Mann characterizes his brother as “a man who died unfinished.” The portrait that emerges in “Lord Fear,” however, is both more and less than that. Mann avoids the more obvious ways a writer might explore the life of someone who died as an addict in his 20s. He doesn’t, for example, try to explain why Josh ended up that way, though there are tempting clues. He doesn’t sensationalize Josh’s death, addiction or repeated attempts to detox.
The best part of Mann’s writing is in the images of Josh we see reflected in other people’s accounts. Even at his best, though, Josh rarely comes off as an attractive person. As a young child, he was volatile and hard to control. As a teenager, he was one of those kids whose charm gave him a pass when he treated people, including girlfriends, shabbily or sadistically. As Mann puts it, he could have any girl he wanted. He is characterized as a “god” by his younger cousin, whom Josh duct-taped to a chair with his pants off and placed him in the elevator in his high-rise apartment building, to be seen by all and sundry. The cousin tellingly says Josh should have been a rock star, as if the important part of becoming a star is not the skill or the hard work or the talent, but rather the ego or perhaps simply the urge to self-destruction.
Still, Josh appears as a gentle, vulnerable teenager to Lena, the girl he rode the tram with to the arts high school in Manhattan, even though he wouldn’t respond to her later attempts to connect. To a Bangladeshi immigrant, Sima, he was a dreamer and a friend; it didn’t matter that his dreams would never come true.
We never really understand Josh; he feels more like an absence than a presence, which is an accurate image for people remembering someone who has died. If Mann meant to capture that feeling, he does it well. Still, there’s something in the refusal to go deeper that seems very characteristically male. When men form bonds, there are places that they don’t go with each other and it sometimes feels as if Mann’s doing that for his brother. Mann draws the title from an image taken from a poem Josh wrote as a 13-year-old. Lord Fear seems linked to this undefined place of vulnerability, shame and absolute defense: “Behind an iron gate with a steel fence in an iron compound, there lives Lord Fear … Lord Fear is frightened of what has never been.”
The men’s stories of Josh are about things — Mann tells about the boa constrictor Josh kept in his apartment. Their father talks about his excitement when Josh caught a fly ball in Little League with his eyes closed. Their brother Dave, however, talks about being disgusted by his cruelty, and their cousin talks about his charm. Even when he provoked his family — “You don’t have to be Freud to realize that a Jewish son showing his father a Nazi tattoo is looking for a reaction” — he somehow remained unchallenged.
Women, however, talk about his inner vulnerability. Beth, his mother, talked about dealing with his extreme meltdowns as a young child. Lena talks about putting makeup on his face to hide his pimples. Sima, who knew him as an addict, talks about how it didn’t matter to her if he could never realize his dreams.
One difficulty of defining Josh, as Mann puts it, is that he was “a musician who doesn’t perform, a writer who doesn’t finish, the owner of a business that doesn’t turn a profit.” Until he died, his dad paid the rent on the apartment he lived in. Josh was full of big schemes that never made it past the dream stage.
Mann found among his papers a dozen or so beginnings of film scripts, all with similar themes about a young man corrupted by drugs and crime, and all ending after a page or two. If he was “unfinished,” it wasn’t just because he died young or was sunk in addiction. It was that — unlike many people in similar situations — he never found his way out of his adolescence and young adulthood into a life.
Yet Mann calls him “beautiful,” and it’s the strength of Mann’s prose that the reader understands, at least, that he was beautiful to the people who loved him.
There are many ways that Mann could have gone more deeply into this subject. But perhaps what he did was enough.