PLACE ENVY

A reminder that orientation, in every sense, is less about where we land than how we move.

In this quiet and elegant collection, novelist and short story writer Lowenthal uses the essay as a means of excavation, uncovering the tensions between his queer and Jewish identities and the desire to belong fully to both. The opening piece, “Out of Nowhere,” sets the tone: It’s a deeply moving examination of family silence, the Holocaust’s long reach, and the burden of inherited stories. When Lowenthal learns of an uncle who perished in Bergen-Belsen, he sets out to trace how the pull of history and desire have both defined and divided his sense of self. In “Ligature,” he recalls the confusions of Dartmouth in the 1980s, when being openly gay meant social exile. A summer spent with an Amish family—whose children experience rumspringa, their brief taste of secular life—becomes his own model for authenticity. “Be more honest, I thought. Be bolder. Be myself,” he writes, a line that captures the book’s ethos. In an essay on Sun Ra, with whom he plays trumpet during a college residency, Lowenthal finds a kindred spirit in the cosmic jazz musician who taught him that fitting in isn’t the point: “Change the space around you.” Throughout, Lowenthal writes with the precision of a novelist and the candor of a confessor. His mother’s unexpected turn from judgment to activist (she joins Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) illuminates the collection’s many grace notes; his reflections on faith, art, and identity give it heft. By its close, this collection has become not simply a chronicle of one man’s search for belonging, but an act of moral and emotional cartography.

A lucid, searching meditation on belonging and self-invention.