Review by New York Times Review
THE personal essay has always been a stepchild of serious literature, seemingly formless, hard to classify. Lacking the tight construction of a short story or the narrative arc of a novel or memoir, such essays have given readers pleasure without winning cultural respect. Written in a minor key, they could be slight and superficial, but their drawbacks could also be strengths. The style of the first-person essay tends to be conversational, tentative - in tune with our postmodern skepticism about absolutes, the trust we place in multiple perspectives. Few writers have pursued this more resourcefully than Phillip Lopate, who started out as a novelist and poet but gained traction when he began writing lively first-person essays in the late 1970s, later editing a landmark anthology, "The Art of the Personal Essay" (1994). Lopate belongs to the generation - my own - that came of age in the '60s, a decade that gave a huge push to all sorts of self-expression, including the essay. Suddenly everyone seemed to have a story to tell, and it could be told directly, not dressed up as fiction. But this avalanche of essays and memoirs began falling into predictable patterns: politically shaded accounts of victimization, self-help homilies, therapeutic tales of abuse and recovery. The immediacy of personal witness got bogged down in self-absorption or social protest. Lopate's essays have taken a different course. His gods are Montaigne, the father of the essay, whose field of research was his own mind, and William Hazlitt, who, besides being an incomparable literary critic, sketched vehement novelistic impressions of what no one else thought worth noticing, from boxing matches and Indian jugglers to "the pleasure of hating." Lopate's three earlier collections and his book-length essays match Hazlitt's promiscuous host of interests with Montaigne's piercing attention to his inner life, his quicksilver thoughts and fugitive impressions. No other writer could have written books on both Susan Sontag ("Notes on Sontag," 2009) and the Manhattan shoreline ("Waterfront," 2004), each of them exhaustively well informed yet disarmingly subjective. Lopate's new collection, "Portrait Inside My Head," gives full play to an even wider range: immensely readable essays on his family, on remaining a baseball fan, on his sex life ("Duration; Or, Going Long"), on the tense romance between movies and novels, on old and new features of New York's urban landscape, and on elusive writers like James Agee and Leonard Michaels, themselves bold essayists who blurred the lines between fiction and nonfiction. To get such a mélange published, most writers would have grasped at some theme to give the appearance of a "real" book. Lopate's introduction takes the opposite tack, making a case for this "motley collection" as a frank miscellany. What holds it together is an engaging voice, the projection of a curious, appealingly modest, sometimes self-mocking character behind that voice, and "the fluent play of a single consciousness." He's gifted at staging his inner conflicts, radiating intimacy without descending into the confessional. Again and again Lopate writes less about a stable subject than about his own constantly evolving views of it. In an ingenious essay, "On Changing One's Mind About a Movie," he writes: "The ultimate question may not be, What is the correct critical judgment to make of a particular film? but. What are our different needs and understandings at various stages in life?" With a wealth of examples of movies that felt different for him when he was younger, he serves up an oblique sliver of autobiography, taking the measure of his middle-aging self through the movies that formed him. The personal essays that open the book are like snapshots, a memoir by glimpses, each from a different angle: his parents' ill-fated camera shop in their mostly black and Hispanic - and poor - Brooklyn neighborhood; his loving but competitive relationship with his older brother, Leonard, the well-known radio host; an embarrassing episode as a youthful Hebrew tutor, sliding down "the slippery slope of disbelief," behaving badly, losing his small store of Jewish faith; and best of all "The Lake of Suffering," a wrenching account of a grave illness that kept his baby daughter in the hospital for many months after her birth. These last two, one comic, the other near tragic, are as riveting as short stories, with arresting openings, sculptured scenes worthy of fiction, introspective passages fingering his own feelings, and haunting conclusions that resonate with everything that came before. Lest we miss the craft that shapes these pieces, Lopate has brought out a second collection of essays, "To Show and to Tell," that gives away all his trade secrets - a thoughtful guidebook for writers of literary nonfiction that could serve as a commentary on his essays. It threads its way around the pitfalls of personal writing: the need to turn oneself into a character; to write honestly, assertively about friends and family; and to find exactly where and how to sign off. From experience he counsels writers to "make lots of friends, because you are bound to lose a few," and "for the same reason, try to come from a large family." Lopate's sensible advice, like his own practice as a writer, often conflicts with received wisdom. He exhorts first-person essayists not simply to stay in the moment, the time they're writing about, but to play off their raw recollections against what they have now come to understand. Upending the mantra of most writing programs - "Show, don't tell" - he urges them to season their memories with research, ideas, analytic thinking and argument: tools borrowed from more formal essays. He reaches back to older traditions in essay writing and concludes both books with studies of literary masters (like Hazlitt and James Baldwin), pieces that, as reflections of his own sensibility, are just as personal as those on his family. Academics love to theorize, but Lopate, though he has taught writing for many years, remains "a storyteller at heart" who can liven up any subject with nimble anecdotes from his life. Even his critical essays never stray far from narrative. He turned away from poetry because he lacked feeling for the timeless, the transcendent, the apocalyptic. When he took up writing essays, he says, "I threw in my lot with ordinary life, 'the daily round.'" Yet some of the discipline of poetic writing stayed with him. He invariably drives home a point with a punchy aphorism or puts a spin on a sentence with a colloquial phrase, an unexpected word. When he says of Michaels's abrupt, impacted style that he could really "goose a sentence," he is showing us exactly what he means, just as when he notes tersely, "What is wit, if not the formulation of a behavior pattern in a pithy sentence?" In the stark coda to "Portrait Inside My Head," he tells us, "It is only when writing that I begin to exist," while "getting through daily domestic life" is a chore. Lopate's feeling for form comes out in how he shapes these volumes, saving some of the best essays for last. Perhaps the most surprising piece in "Portrait Inside My Head" is cast as a long letter to an editor on why, after one unpleasant try, he refuses to read any more of the bitter, misanthropic fiction of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. As a young man Lopate had invariably chased difficult modernist works, addicted to the next big thing, the darker the better. Now he recoils: he resists "the blackmail of the avant-garde," nor can he convince himself that "tedium was a necessary prelude to ecstasy.... If Bernhard extended Beckett, did that alone make him worth reading?" Here, as in the delightful essay that follows, tracking his mixed feelings about Stendhal's "Charterhouse of Parma," Lopate links his reading experiences (like his fluctuating taste in movies) to the passage of time, the twists and turns in his life, the ages of man. This is the ultimate subject of all worthwhile memoirs, even those that come disguised as a motley gathering of essays. Morris Dickstein teaches English and film at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent book is "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression." He is completing a memoir.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 3, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Lopate, a consummate and piquant essayist and director of Columbia University's graduate nonfiction program, draws on his extensive teaching experience in this expert, anecdotal, funny, and frank guide to writing intelligent, satisfying, engaging literary nonfiction. Even in a how-to book, Lopate can't help but write lithe and sparring personal essays, so we learn, for example, that he honed his chops as a ghostwriter. His sophisticated advice touches on psychological challenges as much as craft, such as when he names self-hatred as a stumbling block for writers, and, admitting his own audacity when writing about family and friends, instructs memoirists to be prepared to accept the guilt when people get upset. He also suggests developing a tone of assertion. Lopate draws helpful comparisons with fiction, noting that nonfiction also requires conflict and the art of characterization but that its story line is a thought process. Never one to accept received wisdom, Lopate encourages writers to go beyond the safe, facile, and sentimental. To see him practice what he preaches, turn to his newest essay collection, Portraits inside My Head.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Lopate (director, graduate nonfiction program, Columbia Univ.; The Art of the Personal Essay) offers here another title in what seems to be a whirlwind of recent publishing on creative nonfiction. His discussions and opinions primarily concern the personal essay as representative of the wider genre of literary nonfiction. Lopate is particularly successful in probing the psychological aspects of such factual, intimate writing. His advice is as ruminative and open-ended as the writing style he seeks to draw out of his students, a more philosophical and thought-provoking take on the craft of literary nonfiction than can be found in most of the other choices on this subject. The first part, "The Craft of Personal Narrative," contains the bulk of the text. Section two, "Studies of Practitioners," covers Lopate's favorite essayists, including Charles Lamb, Edward Hoagland, and James Baldwin. VERDICT Writers and teachers of the personal essay will certainly want this title. Others with a broader interest in literary nonfiction may opt for works presenting more of an overview, such as Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd's Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction or Lee Gutkind's Creative Nonfiction: How To Live It and Write It. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/12.]-Stacey Rae Brownlie, Harrisburg Area Comm. Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
One of the Earls of Essay returns with a collection that illustrates both his knowledge of the genre and his considerable skill in practicing it. Some of these pieces have appeared earlier, and they range in nature from struggles to define the genre, to pedagogical strategies he's tried (and recommends), to reviews of the essays of other writers--living (Ben Yagoda, whose chin is the target for some Lopate left hooks) and not (Lamb, Hazlitt, James Baldwin). Lopate (Graduate Nonfiction/Columbia Univ.; At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay, 2010, etc.) is both at ease and ill at ease with the definitions of "creative nonfiction," "memoir" and "lyric essay," and he continually revisits his discomfort. He confesses that he's neither a philosopher nor a professional rhetorician, so he sometimes has difficulty articulating precisely what he means. Most readers will disagree. Lopate also repeatedly uses moments from his own classroom to illuminate his points, mentioning struggles that students have finding a "voice," defining the "I" they will use, figuring out how to organize and how to end a personal essay. He urges all to ignite the curiosity and follow its flames. In the piece "The Essay: Exploration or Argument?" he somewhat softens his earlier view that the personal essay contains no argument. We learn that he's kept a journal since age 17 and that he recognizes, though grates, at the lower status nonfiction inhabits in academe. He takes a little poke at Facebook (though he fears no real evil from it) and expresses great admiration for Emerson and Baldwin, "the most important American essayist since the end of World War II." A useful collection of bracing thoughts and sinuous sentences.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
