THIS WIDE, TERRAQUEOUS WORLD

Deliberately digressive personal essays on the intersection of art, history, and happenstance.

Hunt has long been an acclaimed experimental fiction writer, and even his more conventional novels, like Zorrie, are high on lyricism and atmospherics. As such, it’s not surprising that while these essays generally concern the writing life, there’s little in the way of straightforward confession or craft guidance. “Climb the Whale,” the centerpiece, sinuously shifts from Hunt’s attempt to write a Western to his teenage interest in Levi’s jeans to a 19th-century photo of a dead whale in Massachusetts. An appreciation of the writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai enters the narrative, too, yet for all his meandering, Hunt captures a sense of how stray memories and images inform storytelling, “all the sorts of things that can be seen in the fades of one’s jeans.” Similarly, the title essay is ostensibly about a research trip he conducted for Zorrie, which is about the Midwestern Radium Girls of a century ago. But as his car gets stuck and he finds himself more deeply immersed in the Great Plains, it becomes a meditation on nature and writers like Willa Cather, whose novels “seem so beautifully drunk on the deeper registers of life’s best natural beauties.” Elsewhere, Hunt considers connections between museum relics and our own pasts; the charm of childhood recklessness; and a five-year stint working at the United Nations. Throughout, he captures the feeling of the hard work of writing, the way a failing novel is “ice you do not want to walk over.” The author isn’t a prose poet, but he writes with a poetic sensibility, letting the metaphorical meaning and depth of his observations arise naturally out of his prose without laboring to extract them.

A slim, elegant attempt to describe the curious alchemy of fiction writing.