Review by New York Times Review
THE GREAT PROMISE of essays is the freedom they offer to explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty; to evade dogmatism and embrace ambivalence and contradiction; to engage in intimate conversation with one's readers and literary forebears; and to uncover some unexpected truth, preferably via a sparkling literary style. In the preface to "Loitering," his new and collected essays, Charles D'Ambrosio presents himself as a true believer in the form. Having digested "all of Joan Didion and George Orwell, all of Susan Sontag and Samuel Johnson, all of Edward Abbey and Hunter Thompson and James Baldwin," he saw essays as "fast friends": "I must have needed that sort of close attachment, that guidance, the voice holding steady in the face of doubt, the flawed man revealing his flaws, the outspoken woman simply saying, the brother and the sister - for essays were never a father to me, nor a mother." D'Ambrosio has also published two fine collections of short stories, but it is his essays, appearing in literary magazines and previously in an obscure small-press edition, that have been garnering a cult reputation. Now that they are gathered in such a generous collection, we can see he is one of the strongest, smartest and most literate essayists practicing today. This, one would hope, is his moment. D'Ambrosio, a self-doubting loner, views communal moral certainty with disdain. The book opens with two stunning essays set in Seattle, the author's hometown. The first, "Seattle, 1974," is a wryly moody rumination on the place before it became stylish: "The Seattle of that time had a distinctly comalike aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything - one dog a-barking, one car a-cranking, one door a-slamming, etc. - and then an extravagant, unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing." The second, the book's title essay, is an account of trying to horn in on a news event - a SWAT team cornering a poor schlub who may or may not have a gun - at 2 in the morning. There are hilarious descriptions of the television newscaster practicing sincerity before going on camera. As for himself: "My main problem vis-à-vis journalism is I just don't have an instinct for what's important." He is at defensive pains to distinguish his essays from "articles," although the book's weaker efforts do in fact read like competent journalistic assignments. In a sense, D'Ambrosio can even be seen as a descendant of the New Journalism of Didion and Thompson, inserting his hapless presence into the story. We come to know him well - or his persona, in any case, since every personal essayist must speak through a mask of sorts. Self-mockery is a frequent device, if only to reassure the reader there will be no narcissistic bragging. D'Ambrosio describes himself as a "miserable broken bad animal" who "never really held a serious job or applied myself to anything worthwhile." He is, he tells us, an unreliable friend: "I've never loved anyone deeply or satisfactorily." Often broke, at times sleeping in cavern mouths and hopping freight trains, he evades a question about his earning power, too embarrassed to admit he was being supported by family members "until my new mood stabilizers kicked in and I could once again think clearly about my life, i.e., get out of bed in the morning." The presentation of himself as a damaged outsider, barely holding on, ups the dramatic ante, though it does seem at odds with the accomplished, balanced, commanding prose D'Ambrosio appears able to muster with every sentence - not to mention his prestigious awards and teaching stints. But he certainly has cause to feel damaged, as we learn from his family history: One brother committed suicide; another brother, schizophrenic, jumped off the Aurora Bridge but lived. His "monstrous" father, a professor of finance, stopped communicating with his seven children, gave all of his money to the Roman Catholic Church and ended up a crackpot. (Curiously, D'Ambrosio never writes about his mother.) In a brilliant essay on "The Catcher in the Rye," D'Ambrosio identifies with J. D. Salinger, and insists the reclusive author was not interested in coming-of-age stories but in suicide, silence and the dubious haven of the family. Mulling personally on how suicide affects a family, he notes: "Since my brother died I haven't slept a single night alone with the lights off; I wake up afraid, and I have to know where I am, I need to see right away. And when I go out, I always leave a radio on, just so that when I come home I'll hear voices or, more precisely, I won't hear the silence." Contemplating Holden Caulfield, D'Ambrosio sees an attempt "to explore a disturbing and extreme loss of identity that leaves this one boy absolutely alone." ISOLATION IS D'AMBROSIO'S big subject. Marked genetically by his grandfather (a Chicago bookie who beat his own brother to a pulp), he shivers from yet is preternaturally attuned to the possibility of violence. A self-doubting loner, he views communal moral certainty with disdain if not outright hostility. He goes after Save the Whales advocates because they are so sure they know right from wrong. "They're into whales, and not real fond of humans," he says, noting in a neat aphoristic aside how often "a misanthrope and a sentimentalist ... go together." He can be very witty: A sense of humor comes and goes in these essays, but loneliness and forlorn sorrow are never far away. In "Casting Stones," D'Ambrosio indicts the media pundits who had no sympathy for Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who slept with her student. Somewhat annoyingly linking them to terms like "Mosaic," "pharisaic" and "Sanhedrin," he has it in for these rigid moralists because they see only abuse of power where he sees (or wishes he could) a dream of love. For D'Ambrosio, love is a distant rumor. "I needed to believe," he writes in another essay, "that that world of love really might exist, if not for me, somewhere, for someone." He does finally find evidence of love, in a Russian orphanage, among the children. He frequently conjures up imagined offspring he might have had, rather like Charles Lamb's "Dream-Children." In essays, the author has found the perfect medium to challenge smug conviction. "A good essay seemed to question itself in a way that a novel or short story did not," he explains. "It was a forum for self-doubt, for an attempt whose outcome wasn't assured." Happily admitting, "I've depended on my ignorance quite a bit" and "rarely researched" these efforts, D'Ambrosio has tried to use his "little store of half-knowledge" to take back some of the space "we've ceded ... to the expert." His aim, he states, is to "capture the conflicted mind in motion." Confessing that he "worked on each of these pieces a stupidly long time," he claims that "the goal of those revisions was to get the thing to read like a rough draft." In that, I'm afraid he has no chance of success. These are highly polished, finished, exemplary performances. PHILLIP LOPATE, the director of the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of the essay collection "Portrait Inside My Head."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 25, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This powerful collection (11 essays from Ophans, plus new and uncollected work) highlights D'Ambrosio's ability to mine his personal history for painful truths about the frailty of family and the strange quest to understand oneself, and in turn, be understood. In his strongest essays, including an account of a trip to a Russian orphanage, a reminiscence of hopping freight trains, and wrenching family stories, he avoids pathos and uses telling detail to get at some larger truths. In an essay on J.D. Salinger's short stories, D'Ambrosio (also known for his fiction) writes about the suicide of his youngest brother. In a Russian orphanage, he talks with children who will have a hard road ahead, and conveys that he, too, is making his way in a world full of holes, gaps, and scars. In his graceful essay on poet Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," he observes that in a life that's been broken "we know these things happen, and we don't. know why." Without an easy solution, he observes that "answers are as foolish and transient as we are" and challenges writers and readers to "approach the unanswerable," which he himself does here, to great effect. Agent: Mary Evans, Mary Evans Inc. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An essayist and short story writer returns with a collection of pieces ranging in subject from whaling to a Russian orphanage to J.D. Salinger. D'Ambrosio (The Dead Fish Museum, 2006, etc.) begins with some thoughts about what an essay is (he views it as a way to figure out what he thinks) and then launches into his thoughtful and provocative essays, revealing a hungry mind and a pervasive, constitutional sadness. In the first essay, the author deals with his attempts as a young man to leave his boyhood home of Seattle, and he introduces some of the darkness (geographical and personal) that inhabits the other essays. Among the topics that he revisits throughout: suicide (attempts in his family, a leaper from a tower on 9/11), the puzzling aspects of experience (just about everythingfrom decrepit buildings to empty streets; the view from a boxcar he hopped), the fragility of family (his father appears continually), and the abuse of language. He goes off on the prosecutor and the press coverage of the 1998 case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a 35-year-old teacher convicted of having sexual relations with a 13-year-old boy (a former student). D'Ambrosio closely examines the language of the courtroom and the useless indignation that infused much of the press coverage. He considers the vastness of love, and he explores the language of Richard Brautigan, whose prose he does not admire. The author ends with a long disquisition on a poem by Richard Hugo (which and whom he admires). A couple of cavils: It would help curious readers to have publication dates on the pieces somewhere, and although the author chides one of his interview subjects for excessively inflated diction, D'Ambrosio, using words like "emunctory," "gallionic" and "prodromal," will send many readers to the dictionary apps on their smart phones. Erudite essays that plumb the hearts of many contemporary darknesses. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
