Customer Reviews

Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk

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If you're interested in an account of the writing process as it relates to a variety of different writers and contexts, I couldn't recommend a better book. Kopelson is himself a great writer, with a good sense of humor and an excellent command of detail. The Bishop chapter was my favorite, along with the section on Proust. This is a learned book but also a fun read. I couldn't put it down.

The title is ironic. Part critical theory, part psychological analysis, part philosophical exploration, part personal journey, Neatness Counts is anything but "neat." On the contrary, this brilliant collection of five "impressionistic, idiosyncratic" essays is so packed with footnotes, digressions, and parenthetical remarks that the reader feels, at times, as though he were on a roller coaster ride. To his credit, moreover, Kopelson does not insist on drawing one-to-one correlations between writers and their desks. Rather, he pushes his exploration towards deeper, "messier" questions that seek to understand the writers themselves. But even these questions are pit-stops en route to the book's ultimate exploration: the relationship between order and chaos, madness and genius, life and art.