What Should an Essay Do? Two new collections reinvent the form

Leslie Jamison:

Near the end of The Faraway Nearby--a collage-style memoir that brings together history and myth, science and confession--Rebecca Solnit describes an arctic sled made of frozen meat and bones. It falls to pieces during a sudden heat wave when the dogs devour its newly thawed parts. What's remarkable about the image isn't just its macabre silhouette but the kind of restless thinking it generates. Solnit doesn't deploy the sled as a metaphoric vehicle for any single message; she uses it to consider multiple truths at once: how suddenly a whole can dissolve into its parts, how our hungers compel us to destroy what we need, and how our most precious objects fall apart for reasons we can't predict or forestall.

Throughout The Faraway Nearby, Solnit draws analogies between disparate objects and anecdotes in order to make newly available--thawed, edible--those connections she finds between them. She presents these connections as a series of consolations: "Pared back to its bare bones," Solnit writes, "this book is a history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company then." The "emergency" is her mother's dementia, and its urgency reminds us that the associative structure of The Faraway Nearby is less about intellectual virtuosity and more about survival. Solnit finds echoes across registers in order to feel less alone.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 15, 2013 2:08 AM
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