Book Review

My Life Past Due at Barnes & Noble

Accounts Payable: My Life Past Due by David Arthur Walters is a sprawling, fiercely idiosyncratic collection of autobiographical essays and esoteric meditations that treats the ledger of human life as an ongoing, unsettled balance sheet.

Core Thematic Arc The work balances the mundane mechanics of corporate bookkeeping against deep existential, mythological, and philosophical inquiries. The author frames a lifetime of blue-collar labor, clerical precision, juvenile rebellion, and literary ambitions not as disconnected episodes, but as a single spiritual audit. From auditing corporate accounts to dissecting the cultural fallout of Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary through Lacanian analysis and Egyptian lore, the narrative continuously seeks to reconcile material survival with intellectual freedom.

Literary Style & Tone

• Erudite Coprophilia & Esoterica: The writing seamlessly jumps from high-brow literary and theological references (Isak Dinesen, Jacques Lacan, the Book of Isaiah, ancient Egyptian iconography) to raw, street-level observations in Chicago and South Beach.
• Dry, Self-Deprecating Wit: Humor flows through the narrative's refusal to take its own grandeur too seriously. The author embraces ironic titles like "crack adding machine operator" while casually offering biting critiques of corporate greed, local politics, and societal vanity.
• Episodic Scannability: Structured as a magazine-style array of standalone vignettes, the book permits non-linear reading, allowing distinct essays on art, manual labor, aging, and street encounters to shine independently.

Key Strengths

• Unvarnished Authenticity: The voice remains refreshingly unpolished by conventional publishing tropes, delivering candid admissions of personal failures, physical decline, and financial frugality without seeking pity.
• Philosophical Depth in Everyday Mundanity: Mundane tasks—such as clearing Frito-Lay potato chip machines or keying numbers into a ten-key adding machine—are elevated into meditations on human labor, dignity, and alienation.

Areas for Consideration

• Digressive Pacing: The narrative frequently meanders through long philosophical detours and historical tangents that may test readers who are bored by traditional, tightly focused linear memoirs.
• Sharp Tonal Shifts: The abrupt jumps from dense psychoanalytic critiques to gritty personal anecdotes, exciting readers interested with sudden structural pivots.
• Reasonably Priced: The book is reasonably priced

David Arthur Walters delivers a sharp, uncompromising portrait of the artist as a lifelong rogue scholar. Accounts Payable: My Life Past Due stands out as a vibrant, whacky, and genuinely insightful collection that successfully converts life's dejected moments into literary gold.