Objects and Empathy (review)

Abstract

268Fourth Genre Objects and Empathy by Arthur M. Saltzman Mid-List Press, 2001 256 pages, paper, $16.00 Trying to describe the essays he has coUected in ObjectsAnd Empathy, Arthur Saltzman writes in the preface, "I have learned that the terminology itselfis under construction. Once generic distinctions start to leak, people bring in anything that might conceivably hold water. 'Literary nonfiction,' 'creative nonfiction,' and 'lyric essay' are some of the makeshift semantic hybrids in current use and designed to catch the sort of prose work which is very like an essay but which exploits the linguistic playfulness, associative logic, and imaginative license ofpoetry"The kind ofessay he writes, he claims, "tends to prefer insinuation to insistence, resonance to resolution. If the critical essay challenges its topic to wrestle, the lyric essay invites it to dance. ... It is ruminative, sly, self-effacing, intimate, sneaky fast, and (as long as we're breaking in new expressions) 'idiosyncretic.'"Whatever the final terminology we attach to what he's doing in the book, his descriptions of the form certainly apply to his own essays. In a way, Objects and Empathy is composed of essays in the most traditional sense, the kind of associative attempts that Montaigne originated in his great coUection of essais. In the Montaignian tradition the essay is an adventure in associations, a meandering trail of bread crumbs through the mind of the essayist; it is writing that Addison described as "running out into wildness" and seeming to be "thrown together . . . without any order or method" in order to "appear in looseness and freedom." It is also the kind ofwriting thatJohnson defined as "an irregular, indigested piece." It is probably relevant that Saltzman quotes Joseph Epstein (who like Saltzman grew up in Chicago) in his preface: Epstein is one of our foremost traditional essayists, who has described his own essay writing as "taking a line out for a walk," essentiaUy starting somewhere on a subject and foUowing the thread to an unplanned conclusion. Edward Hoagland and PhiUip Lopate are essayists in this tradition as weU, as is Cynthia Ozick, whose own titles (Art & Ardor; Memory & Metaphor) are similar to Saltzman's. This was the tradition which, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spawned countless essays on whatever topic the essayist chose to take up—Mary Coleridge once wrote a dandy essay on paper matches—since the reader's delight in the essay was not in its information or its argument but in watching the essayist make something ofthe topic. The title essay of Saltzman s collection Book Reviews269 is just such a piece, an essay that takes a loose coUection of objects—particularly stones—and rummages through a range of literary artifacts in which objects are displayed and their significance explored. Like an essay by Montaigne the discursive piece by Saltzman quotes liberaUy from other writers and follows a strand of associations that only this author could make—"My style and my mind alike go rambling," says Montaigne. In another way however, Saltzman goes beyond the linear ramble of the traditional personal or familiar essay. Many ofhis essays are segmented, multifaceted , seemingly loose assemblages of associative fragments. "How to Play" for example, is a rich quartet of discussions of board games: Sorry, Monopoly, Careers, and Scrabble. Each section probes the mechanics of the game and the psyche of its players, taking the commonplace and imbuing it with significance. In another, "The Girl in the Moon," a second-person history of a father's anguish over his young daughter's brain damage is punctuated with quotes from astronauts involved in the first manned lunar landing. Saltzman sometimes writes in first person, sometimes in second, sometimes in third, sometimes in a fictional persona, as when he writes letters to and from the imaginary comic book hero Gamma Man. The essays sometimes include intimate reflections on divorce and death but are never solely about the author's personal life as much as they are about the workings of the author's mind. At times the essays are tightly bound, as in a linear piece like "Body Language"; at other times they are artfuUy crafted, as in "Centers of Gravity," in which scenes from the author...