Nonfiction

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Time On Fire

By Evan Handler. Little, Brown. 279 pp.

Evan Handler's vivid, whip-smart new memoir, about his lengthy and victorious fight against leukemia, began life as an acclaimed off-Broadway play, and much of that show's energy and bite carry over onto the page. Handler was 24, and already an accomplished stage and film actor, when he was diagnosed and coldly informed -- by a sour doctor who reminded him of Richard Nixon -- that his chances for survival were almost nil. That moment, Handler recalls, was "like one of those Twilight Zone episodes, where everyone acts like they know you, and they do know all about you, but you've never met a single one of them, and you can't understand how your life got switched around with someone else's."

"Time on Fire" becomes a kind of medical roller-coaster ride as Handler takes us along on his five-year crusade against rather desperate odds. From the corridors of New York's chilly Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center (where he was "surrounded by people who figured my death was to be expected") to the Madison Avenue sperm bank he consulted in case chemotherapy rendered him unable to have children ("I came into the cup, thinking only of the story to be told to my children one day of how they came to be") to the world of New Age healing, "Time on Fire" moves at a feverish pace as Handler races against mortality's clock.

Spiked with humor and dizzying clarity, Handler's story is a genuine testament to human will. While he acknowledges vast support from family and friends, ultimately he "discovered that dying is not the only part of life that is inevitably done alone." What could have been another rambling Generation-X discourse on being thrown one of life's curve balls turns out to be a moving account of life on the brink. Many more revered (but less talented) young memoirists -- "Prozac Nation" author Elizabeth Wurtzel comes to mind -- could learn something from Evan Handler.

--Meg Cohen Ragas

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