The Way We Die Now was published by Random House in 1988, shortly after Willeford’s death from a heart attack in March of that year. The title echoes Trollope — The Way We Live Now — and the echo is deliberate: Willeford, like Trollope, was interested in the way society organizes itself around money, status, and self-deception.
Hoke Moseley is back in Miami, investigating deaths in a retirement community — deaths that may be natural, may be assisted suicides, or may be murders. The investigation takes him into the world of elderly Florida, where people who worked their entire lives have retired to the sunshine and discovered that leisure, without purpose, is a form of suffering. The retirement community is a microcosm of American life: a place where the promises of comfort and security have been kept, and where keeping them has produced not happiness but despair.
The novel is tinged with mortality — not just the deaths Hoke investigates but his own awareness of aging, of diminishment, of the body’s inevitable betrayal. Willeford was sixty-eight when he wrote it and knew his health was failing. Whether he intended the novel as a farewell is impossible to say, but it reads as one: a final, clear-eyed look at the way people face death, written by a man who was facing it himself.
Collecting The Way We Die Now
First edition (Random House, New York, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good/very good: $15–$40