Customer Reviews

Room for Doubt

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This is a fine book. To begin with the least important element, it is beautifully produced, at least in the small hardback edition I purchased. The font is lovely and so are the pages. These aesthetics seem to do homage to the fineness of Lesser's thinking and writing. Very occasionally, she is a bit crude or harsh in her judgments--as when she speaks dismissively of the great architect Daniel Libeskind--and I imagine, from what she admits of her own tendency to anger and to absolute critical assertions, that it would be no fun to cross her. But the writing is that of a Mentsch, someone who has looked inward and taken her own measure, as well as that of an art lover, an unapologetic humanist, and a caring friend. She writes in the vein of Montaigne (with less of his sprawl), of E.M. Forster, and perhaps of Walter Pater, another aesthete and bellelettrist. I read this book during my own stint in Berlin, and her responses to the city seem to me absolutely right on as well as delicately, cleverly articulated. I loved the essay on Hume, and it struck me how many great essays have to do with failure--Forster wrote "On Not Looking at Pictures" and "On Not Listening to Music"--and Proust wrote a 5-volume essay-novel on failing to write. Finally, Lesser's piece on Leonard Michaels is perfectly calibrated in its honesty and its homage.

I learned about myself from reading these essays--what better response can one have to a book? Narcissistic, maybe, but isn't it what many of us go to literature for? To understand ourselves better? Perhaps, even, as the Victorians said, to "improve" ourselves a little bit?