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A Plea for Eros: Essays

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Siri Hustvedt is one fine writer. Her skills go beyond the technical expertise of honing in on a thought, relishing it, dissecting it, relating it, and offering it back to the reader. Here is a writer whose depth of knowledge about literature is vast and whose spectrum of sensibilities about living and the hurdles involved is uniquely her own.

A PLEA FOR EROS is a collection of twelve essays written over the course of time from 1995 to 2004 - a bit of information that is more important than the tidbit suggests... Hustvedt reminisces about her childhood in Minnesota, her brief juncture with being a movie extra in an adaptation of Henry James' 'Washington Square' that centers on the topic of corsets (!), the personal effect of 911 on her life and beliefs, her perceptions of the differences between the sexes, and the meaning of place. She also provides some very erudite and fascinating studies of Henry James' 'The Bostonians', Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other luminaries of literature, finding her attention focused not solely on the literary merits of these writers, but also on topics that bounce off her springboard of creative thinking initiated by the subjects.

For this reader Hustvedt is at her best when she explores the waters of emotion and eroticism not only in literature but also in the way our society has come to interact. 'We live in an age of religious sects and mad militias, of gurus scattered about the country form California to New York, an age of channeling, colonics, crystals, and raw food crazes.' From this stance Hustvedt takes us places to prove that we are where we come from, that our exuberance for life comes at a price yet not one too dear to make. She is enlightened, entertaining, controversial, and a spinner of pages of elegant writing that makes time spent between these two covers very special. Finding the thread that unites these twelve fascinating essays is the joy she offers. Grady Harp, February 06

This is honestly one of the most fascinating works I have read this year, Hustvedt's essays a fluid mix of personal recollections, comments on literature and a view of the writing life. The author's love of language is evident, as is her engagement with the world, all imbued with a passion that fills each thoughtful memoir and cultural/literary criticism: "My private geography, like most people's, excludes huge portions of the world." She views history with a compassionate eye, mining the past for the symbols and literary gems, from Henry James to Charles Dickens to F. Scott Fitzgerald, hinting that the true Eros lies in the fertile imagination, in a capacity for difference, ambiguity, tolerance and curiosity.

The collection begins with "Yonder", an autobiographical essay of the "miraculous flexibility of language" and the nature of the places we collect as memory, infused with a personal magic. The immigrant experience of the author's background exists somewhere between here and there, somewhere yonder that is never reached, much like the journey that is savored, rather than the destination. The three places that loom in the author's life are Northfield, Minnesota, New York and the Norway of her grandparents. Even here, the author digresses into the subtle terrain of language, tying elements of the personal with the reading experience, "the world of reading is a kind of yonder world."

In "A Plea for Eros", the author makes a case that familiarity and the humdrum of everyday life are the enemies of Eros, that eroticism thrives on borders and distance, a theme supported in the following essays, "Gatsby's Glasses", "Eight Days in a Corset", "Being a Man" and "Leaving Your Mother" and more. This spectacular collection includes previously unpublished work, "Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment" and two others that have not been published in the United States, "9/11, or One Year Later" and "Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self". Each page is filled with thoughtful observations, all linked to literature, language and the human experience.

Each essay contains revelations, those obscure connections between reality and the world of the imagination: Creating fiction is making a place for the reader in the text, "the words accelerate the book, they don't bog it down in pointless novelistic gab" and "writing fiction is remembering what never happened" (Yonder); American feminism has perforce ignored erotic truth, a willful blindness, revealing that "seduction is inevitably a theater of barriers" (A Plea for Eros); and "The true ground of all fiction is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination" (Gatsby's Glasses).

A Plea for Eros is not only a delightful exploration of ideas but a personally rewarding experience. Hustvedt's insights are revelatory and provocative, meditations on the written word, personal experience and intellectual curiosity that are nothing less than extraordinary. In prose so rich that it bears a kind of enchantment, Hustvedt combines her own narrative with the joy of fiction, nonfiction, wit and passion, an endless chain of associations with an undeniable affection for literature. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

What do essays on corsets, parenting, post-September 11th New York, an obscure character actor, and Charles Dickens all have in common? Not much really, but these disparate topics are brought together in A PLEA FOR EROS, previously published essays by Siri Hustvedt.

Hustvedt is best known as a novelist and is the author of WHAT I LOVED and THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILY DAHL. Hustvedt's essays are very writerly, usually exploring issues of identity or literary concepts. Some are personal while others are more academic in nature, but all are thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Hustvedt begins with a piece entitled "Yonder," which is one of the more successful and readable essays in the book. She examines the idea of place and memory and the shaping of family, individual and community identity. This is very much a story about her Norwegian family and how this background has shaped who she is. Readers are introduced to her relatives, in this country and in Norway, to her small hometown in Minnesota, and to the New York she chose as home as an adult. Hustvedt begins by discussing the idea of "here and there," and though she sometimes seems to move far from this theme in the essays, she always does wind her way back to this concept and how "here" and "there" play in our imaginations.

Several of the essays are about novels and authors and, more broadly, literary themes explored by particular authors. Here, readers unfamiliar with the texts or less than interested in literary criticism may be bored, uninterested, or left in the proverbial dust as Hustvedt dissects THE GREAT GATSBY and other works. "The Bostonians: Personal and Interpersonal Words" is an interesting look at a Henry James story, and "Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment" explores the idea of death and the dead body in the work of Dickens. These literary essays are, of course, not personal in the way the others in the collection are, but Hustvedt's deep appreciation of these authors and their works is personal in its way.

The essay on Dickens is the longest and by far the best of the three literary-themed pieces. While Hustvedt is focusing on OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, she illuminates themes found in much of Dickens's work such as the absent or abusive father figure, madness, and self-identity (the "I"). Even readers unfamiliar with Dickens's work may be interested in her analysis.

Although there is seemingly little unification in this collection, Hustvedt brings her topics together by making them personal to her and always coming around to the idea of identity or self. She relies heavily on psychology in her examinations. A PLEA FOR EROS is a mostly interesting and readable collection, but it has limited appeal. It can be dense and wordy, and at times is an intellectual exercise as opposed to entertainment. Hustvedt's style is elegant, however, and her range of knowledge impressive. Recommended for readers interested in essays closer to those of Susan Sontag than Sarah Vowell.


--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

Siri Hustvedt is usually pretty good. She wrote a great novel in which she accidentally uncovered one of the great true crime mysteries of human times, the case Hollywood enshrined as "Party Monster," accidentally finding out that the real culprit was roosting right within her own family, a situation which, hitting so close to home, provoked her to the cutting edge of fiction, sharpening her instruments all around. Ever since that book, she has been a contender in the contest for who is the greatest American novelist. Last year we saw the publication of a book of her essays about painting. I think even her strongest supporters would agree that art criticism is not really her forte. But as an occasional essayist, she could write for the New Yorker, and on occasion her writing is a little bit like that of the late Edmund Wilson, for she has a wide mind and the capacity to speak it no matter what the circumstances.

Among the collected essays of A PLEA FOR EROS she has placed an appealing little story about being an extra in a film with Jennifer Jason Leigh and having to wear a corset for an extended period of time; this enables her to sort of "get into" the feeling of what it might have been like to be an American woman of the 1870 period. Her best essays are founded in this combination of the personal, the physical, and something extra that might be called, the metaphysical. However a few of the pieces here are just light fluff, which is a shame because a book like this is only as strong as the weakest of its pieces which in this case, is pretty weak.

The best of the bunch is her analysis of movie sissy Franklin Pangborn and trying to figure out why this ridiculous movie character, the "quintessential tight-ass," as she calls him, appeals to her so. It's the kind of thing Sontag might have been proud to call her own. "In my domestic life," she writes, "I fight blur, ambiguity, cyclones, and decay (if not disease). It is a classically feminine position, which is not to say that there aren't scores of men who find themselves in it. I don't know if Pangborn is ever seen actually cleaning in a film, but it is not necessary to see him at it. His character is spotless and obsessive, a figure of perfect order." Quirky and spot-on, Hustvedt's musings strike a chord among anyone who has ever seen their own worst failings animated on the screen, reversing Lacan's mirror image with a hilarious contempt for the "nitwits" that populate every stage of our lives.

This is the second book I've read by Siri Hustvedt. The first was her novel 'What I loved', which I think shared some of the same strenghts and flaws with 'A plea for eros'.

The strenghts, as I see it, have to do with Hustvedt's elegant writing style, richness of thought, and breadth of knowledge. She very obviously is an intellectual, a woman who has been reading books and thinking about books (and art) all through her life; she also has a good understanding of human psychology, of the vicissitudes and peculiarities of sexual relationships, of the complex fabric of parenting and child-adult relations. Essays such as 'Yonder', where she explores her double (American / Norwegian) roots, or others where she explores her relationship to her mother and daughter, are nicely written, insightful, and provide food for thought.

In a way 'A plea for eros' could have been split in two parts, since the essays in it belong to two quite distinct categories- one part is Hustvedt's literature essays, the other is her essays about human relationships, sexuality, family, parenting etc. I think the latter are more appealing but also more problematic- as I said, I think they share the same strenghts and flaws with 'What I loved'.

The problem is an exhibitionism, a kind of self-consciousness which is as if Siri Hustvedt is providing us with a glimpse into her life, a life that I get the feeling we should be admiring (even though this is done in a most subtle way). A good example is her description of her first few days in New York, where she moved as a young woman from a small-town in Minnesota: 'My first few days' she says 'were spent rereading Crime and Punishment in a state that closely resembled fever'. Now is it just me or is this a pretentious phrase, which does not ring true at all? In a nutshell, there is a sense in this book, as in 'What I loved', of frequent name-dropping (mostly intellectual name dropping...which doesn't make it any less so!) and of sharing quite private moments, like her description of meeting and falling in love with her author-husband, Paul Auster. As I said, these characteristics could be considered strenghts, since Hustvedt's books end up being quite personal, direct and often very true. But they are also flaws, since her descriptions of herself and her life often become quite idealized and a bit pretentious.

"A Plea for Eros" is a rarely insightful and succinct title for an essay. It summarizes the subject matter and importance of what the essay itself has to say in many more words. The essay, "A Plea for Eros", gives its name and theme to this collection of twelve essays published as a book in 2006 by the American author Siri Hustvedt. I read the essay and the book of which it forms the key part after reading Hustvedt's novel, "What I Loved" (2003). What I Loved: A Novel My book group has just dsscussed Hustvedt's novel. Hustvedt's essay on the importance, and frequent neglect, of eros captures for me a great deal of the theme of her difficult novel, as do other essays in the collection. I tried to use the essays to increase my understanding of the novel. While there are several other good and related essays in this collection, including "Being a Man" in which Hustvedt discusses her use of a male narrative voice in "What I Loved", I want to focus in this review on the title essay as it relates to the novel.

The climactic scene in "What I Loved" occurs near the end of the novel where the aging narrator, Leo, makes a strong romantic overture to a woman named Violet, the wife of a deceased close friend, Bill. Leo has loved Violet for many years. Violet strongly, and with unmeant cruelty, rejects Leo's love. It becomes clear that Leo and Violet had different views of the relationship between them that has developed over the years. Neither of the two characters, but particularly Violet, understands human sexuality and expression well. There is an irony in this lack of understanding in the context of the entire novel, as Violet's professional career involves writing on various expressions of female sexuality.

Hustvedt's essay "A Plea for Eros" first was published in 1995. The essay discusses the pervasive and ambiguous character of human passion, romance, and eroticism. Hustvedt describes how erotic passion tends to be unduly marginalized, rigidified, or even demonized. Much of the essay uses as a foil certain forms of American feminism and political correctness which Hustvedt describes (p.47) as having "a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth." She discusses the claim of some feminists that women are wrongfully seen as sex objects and works to the conclusion that "desire is always between a subject and an object" (p.49) "Women are sexual objects", Hustvedt writes, and "so are men." She continues "every person is keenly aware of the fact that sexual feeling is distinct from affection, even though they often conspire, but this fact runs against the grain of classic feminist arguments." (p. 47)

Hustvedt proceeds to illuminate her essay with stories drawn from her own experience. The most telling of these stories seems to me to illuminate both her understanding of erotic ambiguity and the climactic scene of "What I Loved." Hustvedt describes how, as a graduate student in her 20s, she met a fellow-student, a young man who shared many of her literary enthusiasms. At the time, Hustvedt was romantically involved with another man in a relationship that was not proving successful. Over the course of several months, she and the student began to socialize together, having coffee, reading books and poems, sharing Chinese dinners, and going to movies. The young man never made any sexual comments or made any romantic overtures towards Hustvedt; and she says in the essay that she never had sexual feelings for him.

Several months into the relationship, Hustvedt shared with her fellow student a poem she had written that described the sexual prowess of her boyfriend. The young man was hurt and crestfallen. "Perhaps never in my life have I so misinterpreted a relation with another person", Hustvedt writes. The young man had interpreted the time alone with Hustvedt, the dinners, movies, and conversations, as the opening stages of a possible romance or courtship, as these forms of activities have long been so understood in American life. Hustvedt had taken them more impersonally and less intimately. She viewed them simply as showing friendship, of the sort she had with many men and women, and which did not suggest any further closeness or sexual involvement. She had no sexual interest, she tells the reader, in the man. In the usual harsh euphemism for these matters, Hustvedt considered the young man as a friend.

This little story, expanded many times and writ large, forms the basis for the ultimate rejection in the relationship between the older and seemingly more experienced people, Leo and Violet, in "What I Loved." The story also makes the point that Hustvedt makes at the end of the essay. The essay form, of course, is a much more appropriate vehicle for drawing an explicit and abstract conclusion than is a novel. Hustvedt writes: "This is my call for eros, a plea that we not forget ambiguity and mystery, that in matters of the heart, we acknowledge an abiding uncertainty. I honestly think that when we are possessed by erotic magic..... we are living a story of exciting thresholds and irrational feeling. We are living in a secret place we make between us, a place where the real and unreal commingle." (p. 60)

Hustvedt's essay and her novel describe the undercurrent of erotic passion which runs through human life and which all too often is deprecated, ignored, or misinterpreted. Readers with some sense of the ambiguities and mysteries of human passion may enjoy Hustvedt's novel, "What I Loved" , her essay, "A Plea for Eros" and the volume of which it is a part.

Robin Friedman

The well done cover is certainly alluring, even titiallating, along with the title, but "A Plea for Eros" is not wholly sexual. Siri Hustvedt recalls her Scandinavian background, as well as her life and times in the American Midwest. The stories are autobiographical, well written and Hustvedt does well to put us in her place.

I think her examination of sexuality is one that attempts to get in touch with both her feminine and masculine sides, which all of us have. With these stories she gets in touch with herself, is introspective without being sentimental, and sometimes is very pointed and direct.

Anyone reaching a point in life where they question themselves, or wonder who/what they are should check this out.

Siri Hustvedt is such a beautiful and evocative writer. (Her first novel, The Blindfold, had a huge impact on me). This is a collection of 12 essays written from 1995 to 2004. I love the way she seamlessly weaves imagination with reality - for me there is exhilaration at discovering someone who captures the inner world so well (or at least mine!) My favorite essays were "Being A Man", "9/11 or One Year Later" and "Notes on a Wounded Self." I didn't enjoy her literary criticism as much, finding it a bit dry - I think she is best when she sticks to the personal. All in all, I'd highly recommend this book.

Must never write like that. Ever. Do you know she actually wrote this sentence: "She was a stewardess on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania." A stewardess??? Next she'll be reviving charwomen in stairwells, milkmaids in Brooklyn and God knows what other anachronisms among dying professions.

I did read the part where she considers her putative "manhood." So incredibly trite and boring. And she never fails to mention her NORWEGIAN mother, father, heritage, everything possible that alludes to some "European" peculiarity. At some point, she writes, about her mother, "as a European, fences seemed natural to her." IS SHE FOR REAL??????? Then she says things like "seeing isn't always believing." It's amazing that she gets paid for writing anything at all. Her brain's been soaked in milk and turned into milquetoast.

Another note to self: must avoid Minnesota. May get PTSD and think I'm back in Scandinavia again. As for Siri, I say ship her back to Bergen where she belongs. Cuz Nuyorican she'll never be, PhD or not.

I'd rather be chained to a steel bench for hours listening to Toni Morrison reading "Beloved" in its unintelligible patois than spend 10 minutes even thinking about Siri and her quasi-yodeling Nynorsk among the fjords...