Customer Reviews

Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I begin by acknowledging that I know the author and that our favorite pasttime over the years has been disagreeing with each other. With this book, however, I can find nothing to disagree with. The style is both elegant and chummy at the same time, and there is wit and cleverness on every page, and judicious quotation. The prose is classically balanced, the range of thought satisfyingly large and capacious, and the sharpness of opinion immensely provoking. I have not read a more satisfying book in ages.

These sixteen essays, culled from the last fifteen years of the last century, hold up fairly well here at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, where it would seem that all contemporary essays concerning writing and literature are required to contend with the death of publishing. Mr. Krystal, writing for Harper's and The American Scholar, among others, hadn't reached that point yet, and was free to consider other aspects of the writing and reading life. That in itself is refreshing -- although even as he concentrates on universal topics, there is still a certain amount of age clinging to these pieces.

That is probably the severest criticism I have with this collection -- many of Mr. Krystal's observations concern impressions of the cultural mindset in relationship to literature, and I do think that mindset has subtly shifted in the quarter of a century since some of these essays were written. (Those who, like me, have a hard time believing that 1986 was twenty-five years ago will perhaps not notice this as much. Those who think that twenty-five years ago is, like, so last century, will probably think this 'subtle' shift is much more striking.)

The collection begins with pieces that are reflective: Mr. Krystal received a bit of notoriety in the mid-nineties for an essay called 'Closing the Books: A Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story', which detailed his loss of interest in reading. This is the essay that leads the rest, followed by others about Mr. Krystal's ruminations on knowledge, death, religion, and those writers and their stories which create life-long readers. These first half a dozen or so essays are designed to entertain, which they do.

There seems to be a shift as the collection moves forward though, away from general interest topics (although Mr. Krystal keeps his light tone), and toward more academic evaluations of the philosophy of Art - specifically ideas weighing taste and temperament, imagination and poetry, and literary theory as well as the absence of metaphysical argument in contemporary literature. These essays were significantly more difficult than the earlier ones, at least to this reader, though not impossible. Mr. Krystal brings a wide range of historical figures and concepts to bear in these latter pieces, some more familiar to me than others, and though he supplies some context, he is writing for an audience who already has an interest in these subjects, and who also share a basic literary literacy, so to speak. I don't want to imply that they are full of opaque jargon and aimed at scholars; rather that the venue isn't designed to deliver much background, so the starting point for Mr. Krystal's ideas assume a common foundational knowledge of the topics he addresses.

Similar to single-author short story collections, books of essays have their ups and downs. If forced to pick, I would probably single out the first two essays as most enjoyable, but I thought nearly all of them brought something to the table. Several sparked quite a bit of thought on my part, which I find invaluable. I've noticed that Mr. Krystal has two more collections out since this earlier one; based on what I've read here, I look forward to reading any other agitations he's had since the turn of the century.