In a memoir on an uncharacteristically somber subject, Trillin (American Stories, 1991, etc.) traces the life of his college friend Roger ``Denny'' Hansen: Phi Beta Kappa, Rhodes Scholar, possessor of charm and good looks to spare—and, at age 55, a suicide victim. Denny had seemed such a golden boy that he was photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt for a Life feature on his 1957 graduation from Yale, and his classmates joked about serving in his cabinet when he became President. But life didn't work out that way. Drained of his confidence at Oxford, unable to enter the Foreign Service as he had desired, Denny (now known as ``Roger'' to new acquaintances) fell into a succession of jobs as an itinerant foreign-policy specialist before becoming a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins's School of Advanced International Studies. In his last years, old friends were puzzled by his broken dinner engagements and unreturned phone calls; new associates found him an unsmiling, moralistic nag who never quite fit in. Why did Denny finally kill himself? Because of unbearable back pain (as implied by a suicide note), a dead-end academic specialty, lack of family or loved ones, long-repressed homosexuality—or, as one friend noted, simply because he was ``depressed all of his life''? After searching for the point of no return in his old friend's life, Trillin wisely settles for no easy conclusions (``Roger would have said that you didn't know him at all,'' one lover of Denny's remarks—with which Trillin ruefully agrees). What makes this gloomy post-mortem bearable and even fascinating is a smattering of Trillin's one- liners, as well as shrewd observations on sexual orientation, changes in universities' demographics, and American attitudes toward success. Perhaps more appropriate as one of Trillin's shorter New Yorker pieces—but, still, a fine meditation on one life's aborted promise, the crippling burden of anticipated success, and the mysteries of the human heart.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-22607-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
An eloquent and erudite rereading of the author’s beloved works.
Literature serves as consolation for an eminent and prolific critic.
Legendary critic and professor Bloom (Humanities/Yale Univ.; Lear: The Great Image of Authority, 2018, etc.) has created a literary biography from brief essays on the poems, plays, and prose—many committed to memory—that he has reread, with growing insight, throughout his life. He calls this book “a reverie” that meditates on what it means to be possessed by the memory of “dead or lost friends and lovers” and by works of literature. “When you have a poem by heart,” he writes, “you possess it more truly and more strangely than you do your own dwelling place, because the poem possesses you.” Now 88, Bloom suffers the debilities of aging: “a tremor in my fingers, my legs tend to hint at giving out, my teeth diminish, incipient macular degeneration dims my eyes, deafness increases,” and, even using a walker, he is constantly afraid of falling. He has been hospitalized several times, and he mourns the deaths of many friends, who include colleagues, fellow critics, and poets (John Ashbery and A.R. Ammons, for example) whose works he admires. For spiritual sustenance, religion fails him. “I am a Jew who evades normative Judaism,” he writes. “My religion is the appreciation of high literature. Shakespeare is the summit.” In one of the book’s four sections, Bloom insightfully examines in Shakespearean characters the strange act of “self-otherseeing,” by which he means “the double consciousness of seeing our own actions and sufferings as though they belonged to others.” Other sections focus on biblical verse, American poets, and, in the longest section, elegies. “I seem now to be always in the elegy season,” he writes. Among these poems of praise are lyrics by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson, whose “Morte d’Arthur” provided comfort to Bloom as he was recovering from two serious operations. Although the author has written about these works throughout his career, these essays reveal a deeply personal attachment and fresh perspective.
An eloquent and erudite rereading of the author’s beloved works.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52088-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heinrich's tedious personal account of 12 long months holed up in the wilderness of western Maine is so didactic and self-involved that it makes the reader want to hightail it to the nearest strip mall, where people are at least what they seem. Heinrich (Ravens in Winter, 1989, etc.), a zoologist tired of paper pushing at the University of Vermont, retreats to the New England woods to see the world up close. He chops down trees, assembles a log cabin, digs a latrine, and plants vegetables. But for all his posturing, this hideaway for do-it-yourselfers is not so solitary or so rustic. A newspaper arrives at his mailbox daily (he claims it's necessary so that he can start his morning fire); and he installs a telephone and answering machine in his neighbors' outhouse. Most of Heinrich's days are spent watching his pet raven, Jack, eat the roadkill he has lovingly collected for the bird while fondly recalling meals of run-over muskrat and raccoon he himself consumed in college; calculating the number of seeds a young birch has to shed (2,415,000); creating endless lists of the colors of fall leaves (``light lemon yellow,'' ``yellow with dot-sized red speckles,'' etc.); counting and counting the black cluster flies that invade his cabin (12,800, or ``nine and a half cups full, level''); explaining how to prepare braised mice (``pull the skins off and the guts out'' and throw them in a little olive oil); and making flatulent observations like ``Life is not a spectator sport.'' Heinrich should have learned a lesson from the mountain men he calls his heroes: ``tough men, who did not write books about their exploits, or even talk of them.'' Banality posing as self-knowledge. More boring than Walden.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-62252-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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