Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays

A writer chronicles his life in music-fueled essays.

Thompson, author and creative nonfiction instructor at Sarah Lawrence College, reflects on his life from childhood (joining the Boy Scouts, his first crush in eighth grade, etc.) to young adulthood (“They’ve stopped making seventeen-year-olds of the kind I was—they had mostly stopped making them then—and that is in no way a boast”) to his adulthood in Washington, D.C., and New York, where he took a cheap apartment early in his job history, in the far-flung Cypress Hills neighborhood of Brooklyn. In these 12 brief essays, Thompson touches on life as a son, a husband, a father, and a working man taking the train to the office every morning. (“I feel a bit like a Cheever character; that is to say, I feel—in a way I somehow never have before—like an adult.”) In classic essayistic form, he scares up seemingly random shards of memory and explores them, usually linking them back to the main currents of his thought. For example, thinking of how he read Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics as a boy—“I felt I was [Lee’s superheroes], without their masks or powers”—he explores the ways his own voice was influenced by Lee’s florid style. Music suffuses almost every essay in this collection; he muses on the “low, ominous piano notes” that open John Coltrane’s 1960 tune “Equinox.” The ultimate effect of this wandering narrative approach is very involving. Thompson’s strong, casual prose line immediately makes him an interesting protagonist; he writes movingly about fatherhood or a bit mordantly about no longer being young. Although the contents are evenly divided between the two great cities of Thompson’s life, the sections about New York are the more evocative by far, from the inevitable commentary about the subway system to the strangely persistent defensiveness over whether or not he really belongs. A flavor of hard-won life wisdom gradually emerges.

A companionable, often insightful collection.