A YEAR AND A DAY

A collection of 47 essays written in the course of one year.

Lopate has long been established as an exemplar of the personal essay as well as a critic, poet, and, occasionally, fiction writer. In 2016, he took on a less formal task, producing a weekly blog for the American Scholar. The resulting collection of these posts, penned with a generally light touch, affords Lopate greater freedom of movement and a wider range of subject matter even as it limits cohesiveness. The author employs a pleasantly conversational, self-effacing tone as he explores an array of topics, including the randomness of literary renown, the paradox of urban density, Montaigne as an essayist’s touchstone, the conundrum of censorship in China, marrying a widow, Jewish culinary staples, his “obscurantist tastes” in film, roads not taken, lecturing in Shanghai, and growing up in New York’s jazz clubs of the late 1950s and ’60s. There are also reminiscences of three eminent figures who have passed from the scene—Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, poet/academic Cynthia Macdonald, and New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers—as well as notes on the precarious nature of friendship, the compensations of middle age, and a concluding piece on the actual value (if any) of experience. Lopate, director of the graduate writing program at Columbia, says the challenge was to fill each 500-word post “with improvised filigree, like a jazz pianist playing block chords while waiting for the star saxophonist to return onstage.” The author holds the stage quite well alone, though one would be mistaken to compare these posts to his fully realized essays. Mainly, they are diversions and momentary ruminations, but some have considerable meat on their bones, and they harbor much the same meld of “skepticism, self-mockery and doubt” embodied by the best essays.

A master of short-form discourse succeeds with highly individualized and candid observations.