TABLE TALK

Pithy literary musings on art, culture, politics and life selected from the Threepenny Review’s Table Talk section.

Featuring essays published between 1990 and 2013, the anthology emulates a gathering of critics, philosophers, writers and artists in lively conversation. Topics vary from Sven Birkerts’ battle with a stray cat, mirroring his own restlessness, to Steve Vineberg’s commentary on the “seductiveness of celebrity” so well-articulated in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation. While some contributions are time-specific, most resonate with a universality that goes beyond their publication dates. Life’s exasperating moments turn into humor in Dwight Garner’s account of moving preparations, which involved “Packing (and Lugging) My Library.” Irene Oppenheim’s attempt to help a neighbor becomes a lesson in the “art and etiquette [of] delivering phone books.” John Berger flexes his observational muscles, describing the mysterious ritual a Vietnamese woman goes through at a pool in Paris, and Greil Marcus, writing on the discovery of a 1925 Dorothea Lange photo of his mother, marvels at the photographer’s revelatory power. A lament for things lost echoes through several essays. Though technology can make life more convenient, Arthur Lubow wonders what is “getting left out” in our digitized lives and worries that “what’s new is a thinned-out version of what was old.” Evelyn Toynton mourns the closing of the British Museum Reading Room in service of efficiency, a rare space that “restores the old sense of time, a contemplative rather than harried awareness of its passing.” Claire Messud rues the disappearance from modern novels of digressions, replaced with reader-desired “closure.” “Real life,” she writes, “for all we try to impose order upon it, is but an endless string of digressions.” Without them, she writes, life would be “exceedingly dull.” Not so with this assemblage of ideas, critical thinking and wry observations, which is itself a swell digression. Other contributors include Michael Gorra, Javier Marias, Sigrid Nunez and Robert Reich.

An invigorating collection of passionate, spirited voices.