THE MINIATURISTS

Boundless curiosity inspires an engaging series of essays.

Browning, a professor of performance studies at NYU, melds memoir, philosophical musing, and scholarship in eight essays inspired by, digressing from, and meditating on tiny things. Among the trove of small items that she considers are the “nutshell studies” of Frances Glessner Lee, known as the “mother of forensic science,” who created miniature dioramas of crime scenes in order to examine them for evidence. Watching movies such as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and The Incredible Shrinking Man (and Woman) leads the author to question human significance as one’s body devolves into a speck. Browning returns to this question when thinking about microscopes and telescopes, both of which allow a vision of the “infinitesimal and infinite,” generating a sense of disorientation and even existential anguish. The movies also divert the author’s attention to parenting—by her own mother and father and also her mothering of her son, Leo, who features in several essays (as do her partner, friends, and students). Because Leo was a proficient pianist, she once gave him a toy piano; now, the history of toy piano manufacturing, not surprisingly, piques her interest. A psychoanalytic study of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll, writers “who presented the best-known literary depictions of miniature (as well as gigantic) people,” reveals that both were hypochondriacs. “Maybe you’re wondering what hypochondria and miniaturism have to do with one another,” Browning writes, “or maybe it’s obvious to you that germs are very tiny things, though one’s fear of them can be quite overwhelming.” During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the author has experienced that fear viscerally. Some miniaturists created portraits for lockets, private encasements for images of a beloved. “They were commodity fetishes,” Browning notes, “with a high degree of sentimental value.” The author sees connections between privacy and miniaturism, as well, for writers such as Robert Walser, creator of Microscripts, and Emily Dickinson, who bound her poems into tiny fascicles.

An appealing collection of fresh, free-wheeling essays.