“Any Person Is the Only Self,” the poet and critic Elisa Gabbert’s third collection of nonfiction, opens with an essay that should be, but isn’t quite, a mission statement. She starts by describing the Denver Public Library’s shelf for recent returns, a miscellaneous display of disconnected works she habitually browsed in the years she lived in Colorado. In part, Gabbert (who is also the Book Review’s poetry columnist) was drawn to the shelf for its “negative hype,” its opposition to the churn of literary publicity. But mainly, she enjoyed playing the odds. “Randomness is interesting,” she writes; “randomness looks beautiful to me.” At the essay’s end, she declares, “I need randomness to be happy.”
So does her prose. When “Any Person Is the Only Self” embraces the random, it’s terrific. When Gabbert neatens or narrows her essays, though, they can feel more dutiful.
“Any Person Is the Only Self” — a seemingly random title, and one to ignore; it’s fussier and vaguer than any of Gabbert’s actual prose — is primarily a collection about reading, akin to Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris” or Alejandro Zambra’s “Not to Read.” But it is also a loose meditation on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on Gabbert’s life. During lockdown, she found herself yearning for the “subconscious energy” she gets “from strangers and from crowds, a complicating energy that produces ideas,” and relying on literature as a replacement. She developed a habit of listening to many hours of author interviews, seeking the social life she couldn’t have in person.
Unsurprisingly, this led to some soul-searching on the subject of writing, which appears in the gloriously scattershot “Somethingness (or, Why Write?).” In this essay, Gabbert is at her best. She strings together more than 30 writers’ reasons for writing, variously testing, mocking, admiring and relating to them. In doing this, she gives readers a kaleidoscopic view of ambition and inspiration, always looking toward the random or inexplicable elements of both. In her own case, she adds, she’s become obsessed with leaving behind a body of work, which, she’s decided, is “seven books, even short, minor books. … When I finish, if I finish, seven books I can retire from writing, or die.”
“Any Person Is the Only Self” is Gabbert’s seventh book, and although nothing about it is morbid, death shadows the text throughout. Of course, reflecting on Covid invites thoughts of mortality, but she also writes about her father-in-law’s passing, Sylvia Plath’s suicide and the recent trend of denouncing books by dead writers, as if it were “poor form to die.” (Gabbert, rightly, judges this both tacky and strange.)
But in literature, Gabbert finds not only life after death — she talks about the “metalife” of writing — but also a reason to live and engage with the world. “Any Person Is the Only Self” seems decidedly unlike the work of somebody who plans to retire from writing. Rather, it feels like an expression of gratitude for both the act of reading in itself and for reading as a route to conversation, a means of socializing, a way to connect.
In fact, the book’s more focused essays (one on Proust, one on time in “Frankenstein,” one on Leonora Carrington) suffer largely because they trade this social engagement for the hothouse air of graduate literature papers, which, too often, are written only in dialogue with assigned texts. Their tightness also calls attention to Gabbert’s penchant for stopping essays abruptly rather than coming to real conclusions. “I prefer books that seem a little wrong or unfinished or somehow unprovable,” she writes at one point. But that sentence appears in a book that sporadically offers plenty of proof for its ideas, by way of extensive quotations from “Swann’s Way” or “The Hearing Trumpet.” Intentional though it may be, the discrepancy feels jarring and inapt.
When Gabbert lets herself be thematically loose, however, her essays’ open endings admirably provoke more thought. So does their catholicity, their enthusiasm, their ability to link disparate topics. In “Party Lit,” which starts with “Gossip Girl” and ends with “Appointment in Samarra,” Gabbert replicates the random swirl of a good night out. In “Same River, Same Man,” she pulls off a dual ode to “Rabbit, Run” (an oft-denounced dead-man novel that I, like Gabbert, continue to venerate) and the 1991 thriller “Point Break.” And in “Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge,” another not-quite mission statement, she unites Rilke and home design, leaning heavily on writings by the architect Robert Venturi, who seeks “messy vitality,” “violent adjacencies” and “chaotic juxtapositions” in a building or street.
Had Gabbert allowed mess and chaos to dominate, “Any Person Is the Only Self” would have been a near-perfect collection. As it is, when she lets those elements come to the fore, her work sings.
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