Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances by Lucas Mann

Lucas Mann’s essay collection Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances interrogates fatherhood tropes, both challenging them and recognizing their role in describing and creating the cultural landscape of Mann’s own early fatherhood.

He writes in “On the Fantasies of Various Apocalypses” that fatherhood stories are hard to separate from those of leaving adolescence, each of them a story of becoming, after which a man has become, permanently, himself. They’re wrong about that; there’s nothing singular or finished about becoming, but these stories mark the world we’re growing from. Adopt, adapt, or reject them, they’re still our reference points. These essays consider what to do with that.

The all-speculative first essay, which the book’s running header helpfully shortens to “Tiny, Spectacular Futures,” is a list of fantasies—hopes and fears for the little person the expectant parents have yet to meet and for the world she will inhabit.

In a mimetic skid from the imaginings of pre-parenthood to the grinding realities of daily and nightly childcare (the essays often return to the trauma of sleep training), the second essay uses a 24-section structural conceit: “An Approximate Hourly Record of Thought and Feelings During a Time of Intense Sleep Deprivation.” A collection of fragments, their common connection is the anxiety of influence as a writer and reader, as a product of and participant in a broader culture, and as a son and a father. Mann puzzles over separating communities from doctrine, and whether he’d be capable of that duality: “…if I was raised by racists, I’m pretty sure I’d be a racist” (22). And the anxiety of being influenced is inextricable from the anxiety of the influence a father casts on his child, even if you’re hyper aware of it as it’s happening.

Mann and I have a lot common. There’s our approximate ages. Our daughters. Entering fatherhood in our thirties. Our writer-teacher-academic careers. The beautifully collaborative parenting partnership with wives whose own professional accomplishments are demanding, and which we support and admire. (His wife is very present in the essays, but his apology in the acknowledgments hints he doesn’t want to exploit her for content or claim her separate experiences as his own in these essays, either.) There are the privileges these lives offer us, being able to be at home enough to do necessary and tedious and heartmelting and burnout-level caregiving in ways that other jobs wouldn’t allow.

Relatability is weak criticism, but I recognize a lot. You should have seen me (and I’m about to make you) the way my wife did coming back into the darkened hotel room after a rigorous on-site job interview, our bottle-refusing daughter finally surrendered to exhaustion, me shirtless and covered in what used to be bottled breast milk, and me feral-eyed at her with the so-help-me-if-you-wake-up-this-goddamn-baby look. And like with Mann’s essays, when my wife and I tell this story now, everybody knows it’s a love story.

These aren’t stories of incompetent fathers being sweet idiots at caregiving, as in many popular narratives. The messy realities of parenting your own child can make anybody look clumsy, but here it’s never that Mann feels like he’s doing a job—labors practical, emotional, and intellectual—that isn’t his to do. To paraphrase a famous t-shirt: dad’s not babysitting.

More commonalities: the debilitating self-awareness recognizable across much Gen-X and Millennial literature, and the perpetual uncertainty of whether anything one does is a sincere choice or a performance of not wanting to be seen and judged. But there’s also the way that the ongoing, concrete demands of care and the humility of nurturing an increasingly autonomous, defiant, and endearingly weird little being can mercifully crowd out all of that. There’s the existential creation of meaning in the doing of the things.

And so, there’s the paradox of seeing a community of dads (or dad bloggers), and responding by turning not toward an all-father community, but back inward to himself and his family (like me to myself and mine; totally get that).  That question of performing actual fatherhood in context of actors and writers and bloggers and other parents rhetorically performing fatherhood is a central concern across the collection.

“An Essay about Watching Brad Pitt Eat That Is Really about My Own Shit” smartly examines Pitt’s unselfconscious masculinity, with that affect and Pitt’s body contrasting Mann’s very different self on both counts, and, more importantly, raising how he and his wife don’t want to pass their own childhood body insecurities to their daughter. But the sharp analysis outward is cut with recognition of what he’s also projecting onto the icons he’s reading:

All I want to do is talk about his body and how noticeable it is to me, how noticeable every body is—that’s the problem—and how insulting to think that nobody makes him account for himself. This is the greatest privilege afforded in my fantasy of thinness: that it eventually might allow you to disappear—to other people, sure, but most of all to yourself (55).

Interrogating media, narrative, literature, how we talk about stuff, is central to the book (and to all the writer and reader types I know), but these essays always come back to a reality, feet on the ground, that all our analysis of media and culture and self can unmoor us from. One essay takes on the distraction of the phone and the life that also happens on it, which is exponentially complicated by parenting and the performance of parenting on social media. He shows the very real value of documenting moments for ourselves. The life online and off still happens, no matter how we intellectualize it.

In “Dads Being Dudes Making Jokes,” he interviews some dad bloggers and contemplates dad joke tropes, the laziest jokes, the anti-intimate puns, the jokes that disclaim responsibility for emotional labor. But the buffoon father of those jokes is at least safe, he says, not a monster: “Part of the joke is you can screw up in all these ways and still be lovable, still be good, but then the line between good and bad gets pretty thin, and then the joke becomes unforgivable” (169).

Mann recognizes how ubiquitously and how unfairly “parenthood” has often just been “motherhood,” and how motherhood literature (and mom bloggers) by necessity have been at it much longer than the just-arrived father-writers looking to do more with their stories and their lives than just repeat their inherited tropes, even if they’re still our reference points.

In an essay appearing later in the collection, a respected elder fiction writer laments from a public stage “kids these days” shying away from the wartime shoot-em-ups he saw as the substance of highest literature. But when, over dinner, he told an honest story about being helpless trying to wrangle his sick and hungry twins, Mann was struck that the famous writer shied away from thinking that could also be the stuff of serious story.

The fathers of wars and apocalypses and high adventure dramas aren’t going anywhere (Mann sees the dad in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as endearingly sincere amid the horror). But more honest domestic father stories are emerging, and these essays are part of that new tradition. Individually, such stories won’t make a smoldering cultural crater the way a good ol’ post-apocalyptic horror show might. So, to crack the too-simple, too-evasive tropes that have dominated father stories for so long, we’re going to need a lot more of these, a lot more often, and for a long time.

Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight by Sayantani Dasgupta

With this collection of gorgeous new essays, Sayantani Dasgupta designs for her readers a magical craft that transports us to unexpected places. Alongside her, we fly from Moscow, Idaho, to Florence, Italy and from Kolkata, India (population: four and half million) to a cemetery in Beaufort, North Carolina (population: four and half thousand).

Dasgupta possesses an unparalleled eye for seemingly mundane details that unlock whole worlds of experience—the hemlock, old oaks, and Spanish moss of the southeastern U.S., and her grandfather’s diary, his beautiful hand. The book’s salient delight, though, is the way Dasgupta describes food, both the curious treats of her U.S. encounters, “muscadine jelly, strawberry and walnut jam, a bottle of spicy blueberry glaze, tomatillo salsa, a sample pack of grits, a one-pound bag of the prettiest beans I have ever seen,” as well as the chutneys she presents as a symbol of home. Chutneys engage all our senses when Dasgupta describes them, for they are not just flavorful but also gorgeous, as it can be plain but also decadent, “studded with dates, raisins, cashews, and a sweet mango leather called aam shotto.” Mustard oil, Dasgupta tells us, “pungent at room temperature, spiky when it hits a hot pan,” underpin the whole thing; absent its “anchoring quality” a tomato chutney “just will not sing.”

While vibrant flavors unfamiliar to the American palate are a staple of this kind of literature, Dasgupta brings to U.S.-based readers an immigrant experience we don’t often see. Rather than the typical tale of an immigrant liberated from destitution by the U.S., and offered a menial wage as a blue collar worker, Sayantani Dasgupta gives us, instead, a story of coming to America to write.

In making her art, Dasgupta naturally holds up a mirror for members of the white majority to see themselves. Her time as a graduate student and instructor gives her occasion to show us college culture through her eyes—in that mirror we see “Ugg boots, man buns,” and how to distinguish “hipster from a hippie, an emo from a goth, a nerd from a dork.” We see the sadness and loneliness, too, of kids who were perhaps never taught how to find pleasure in books. And we see the U.S. as a place of promise, yes, where a young woman can realize her dreams of becoming a writer trained at a university, but also of disappointments and contradictions, where the group that has handed down power from generation to generation finds itself threatened by a twenty-first century culture that has asked for a tiny bit more fairness. The collection’s title, Brown Women Have Everything, arose in a conversation between the essayist and a white woman whose envy bubbles through. The woman covets this author’s success, and attributes that success to Dasgupta’s skin color rather than to her abilities. Envy is longing that has turned bitter, brittle, these essays show, and readers witness in Dasgupta’s pages what they’ve seen too many times before: an entitled dominant group that insists on seeing other people as the reason for their unhappiness.

The tragedy of the woman who says brown women have everything is that she really believes it. Her entitlement blinds her to her own privilege, to the spoils of whiteness for which she never had to fight. By dramatizing this moment of envy made explicit, and then planting echoes throughout the book, Dasgupta makes the essay collection in part a meditation on scarcity, resourcefulness, and pleasure, and what it takes to really feel our pleasures and rather than envy feel, instead, I have enough.

Offering a counterpoint to envy, these essays portray the author’s Indian family in moments of delight. We realize, as readers, that to delight in what one already has is to possess a superpower—and that perhaps we should try to acquire that power, rather than every last trophy or token of achievement. The blessings of Bengal—plentiful fish, the soft textures of homespun fabrics, a chorus of life in the bustling streets—are riches that belong to us all. The book offers a sense of magic and of the delightful good luck forfeited by white Americans who want to believe that every good thing they possess results from their own goodness or good works—that they earned what they have, and they deserve it.

The microaggressions Dasgupta endures puncture her sense of connection and belonging. We all share the author’s longing to belong, to be accepted and respected, and yet also be distinctly ourselves. The essay “Mane Story,” centering on the author’s fantastic yet foreign-to-white-American-stylists hair, brings this predicament to life in all its complexity. The form of the essay is perfectly suited to raising such unanswerable cultural questions. Why do white people feel so tethered to deservingness, and at what cost? Is there any amount of civil rights and social justice work that could free Americans from the bean counting impulse to measure who has what, and believe that other people “have everything”? Does white envy do more damage to the envied or the envier?

Without romanticizing the past, Dasgupta presents us a history that lies hidden in plain sight. In an essay about her new home in coastal North Carolina, Dasgupta visits confederate monuments and presents U.S. history in nuanced ways that serve as an antidote to the simplistic debates about race, class, and immigration that plague so much of our discourse. That essay about her coastal home, “Girl in the Rum Barrel,” exhibits what I have admired about Sayantani Dasgupta’s writing since I first read it several books ago. It is her perfect endings—the way she can give us the sense of an ending without wrapping up all the themes and conflicts in a conspicuous bow. That essay’s last paragraph ties it to the collection’s larger themes by mentioning the “rewards” of her outings, the counterpoint of horror and beauty she discovered on her trips near home, and concludes by saying “I grabbed my husband’s hand, and together we went off in search of food.”

What lingers is a sense that we are all still searching, and that we would be better off if we’d just pursue our desires, and appreciate what we find, however short it falls of our aspirations. Westerners, especially bootstrapping Americans raised on a Protestant Work Ethic, could benefit by studying the ability of a south Asian to face the world’s blessings and hardships with gratitude and wonder. These essays show that there’s dignity not just in pursuing your dreams in new places, but also in making mistakes, in being homesick, in the quotidian suffering of bland food and pedestrian conversations. Ultimately, what Sayantani Dasgupta realizes is that her greatest gift is something all of us have as our human birthright: an imagination. And to enjoy its pleasures, all we have to do is put it to use.

Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy by Brooke Champagne

In the opening essay of this witty and incisive debut collection, Brooke Champagne says that “telling and listening to stories” is her “singular affinity,” and the essays that follow are, in part, an attempt to both explain the origins of this affinity and an exploration of how such stories shape our lives. As far as origins go, Champagne comes from a family of larger-than-life characters who aren’t afraid to sprinkle a little fiction into their tales, which is perhaps one reason Champagne clings so fiercely to the truth. There’s her Ecuadorian grandmother, Lala, equal parts mystical and profane, who teaches her granddaughter how to navigate a world rigged to minimize the contributions of Latina women, particularly free spirits such as herself. Lala “sticks it to the man” by shoplifting cheap toys—justifying her habit by only taking items that lack price tags—and punishes her philandering husband by shoving a hot pepper where the sun don’t shine. 

On the other side of the family there is Champagne’s French-Sicilian father, a hard-drinking, yarn-spinning roughneck who “disappears from her life for months, then years, at a time,” only to pop back into the picture when he has a story that’s too good to keep to himself. Perhaps he wants to chat about the irony of getting shot at the Friendly Inn or his encounters with the “Chicken Lady” who gave him an amulet (made of moth wings, navel lint, and crack cocaine) that was so good at attracting women he had to throw it down the sewer just to get some peace. Rounding out the family are a mother whose idea of humor is to lock a young Brooke out of the house, then pretend not to recognize her when she comes knocking, and a sister who calls on Brooke for a ride to a job interview at a strip club named Lipstixx.

Nola Face falls into the tradition of colorful family memoirs like Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club—or Danielle Trussoni’s less well-known but equally compelling Falling Through the Earth—and like those books it both exposes hard truths about her family and makes clear that it is at least in part this unusual upbringing that gives Champagne the tenacity, humor, and imagination that make her writing so compelling. Another trait essential to Champagne’s story is one she inherited from both her family and New Orleans, the city she credits with raising her—this she calls “bugginess,” a word which “represents…the best of humanity: dogged, crazy optimism in times of darkness, an earned, post-Katrina perspective, a flood-took-my-house-but-I’ve-got-a-full-flask mentality.”

One of Champagne’s many gifts is illuminating big ideas through the lens of personal experience, as in “Nice Lady,” where she recounts the night she was carjacked by two young Black men, and investigates how her repeated retellings illuminate the complex racial dynamics of the story. “Because making meaning of it,” she writes, “involved projecting onto myself not just brownness or whiteness, wokeness or brokeness, wrongness or rightness, but some muddled, middle version that makes any self-narrative more challenging to share.”

Another of the book’s best essays, “Bobbitt,” is a level-headed reconsideration of the oft-sensationalized case of Lorena Bobbitt, reframing it as an immigrant story (Bobbitt is also of Ecuadorian descent) and examining more nuanced and complex renderings of her life, particularly in the recent documentary, Lorena. Champagne connects the story to Lala and the infamous hot pepper, but also to her own development as a writer and her philosophy of nonfiction:

The writer, like the documentarian, constructs, repackages, misjudges, and concludes, in the midst of fleeting action, no matter how powerful or terrifying, whatever gets pushed in or sliced off in any discreet moment in human history.

All puns aside, this passage is a succinct rendering of Champagne’s project, which is to think hard about complicated characters and incidents so that she might get to something like the truth. And in Champagne’s hands the truth is often complicated, even traumatic, but never without the doses of humanity and humor that make her writing so compelling.

The book’s title comes from Champagne’s dog, Nola, and the comic and envious face she makes in the presence of other female dogs, those privileged purebreds who flaunt their perfect features and meticulous grooming. Champagne sees parallels in her own moments of envy, particularly to those “pedigreed” writers who seem born into a certain level of privilege and comfort, where she has had to fight and struggle to make a life as an artist. In this struggle, she embodies the spirit of both the dog and the city she was named for, and announces herself as a writer the rest of us will surely find ourselves enjoying (and envying) for years to come.

The University of Georgia Press
$24.95 Paperback | Buy Here

Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope by Jeff Darren Muse

In the interest of full disclosure—which, as an essayist, serial memoirist, and River Teeth editor, is always my interest—I need to tell you that I knew Jeff Muse and Dear Park Ranger when. Many years ago, when I was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University, Jeff Muse was my student. (“Muse?” we all said, one after another. “What a great writer name!”) Along with the enduring impression that Jeff Muse is a terrifically nice guy—and can write the heck out of a sentence—is my memory that he served as a Hoosier ambassador, deepening this Oregon girl’s appreciation for both the people and the landscape of Indiana where I had landed—and, shockingly, that he wasn’t a fan of Annie Dillard.

During Jeff’s time in the program, we had many conversations about what he wanted to achieve in his own essays, and I remember with unusual specificity both because Jeff was so clear in his goals and because these goals were interesting to me. For example, since his expertise, love, and life as a park ranger, environmental educator, and husband of a park ranger was rooted so firmly in the natural world, he knew he would write essays that might be classified as “nature writing,” but he told me what he did not want those essays to be: he did not want his essays to be boring. He wanted to write page turners. Also? Jeff wanted his essays to be funny. He wanted to bring humor in to light up the foggiest landscapes—and he wanted these essays to make a difference. Jeff wanted his essays to get us outside for a nice long walk.

Fast forward a dozen years, I’ve just finished my journey through the intimate, beautiful, inspiring, funny essays in Dear Park Ranger, and I know I need to stay here in this chair and write this review, but what I really want to do is lace up my shoes, grab a water bottle, and hit the trail with Muse’s prose still humming in my mind. In other words: Jeff Muse did the thing. He set his compass for the peak he wanted to reach, as a writer and a man, and—with us along for both the flower-gathering wanderings and the steep stretches where the sweat dripped down our backs—he got us there. Together.

In “Ground Truthing,” the introductory essay, Muse makes good on the title’s promise and lays a foundation for this collection—which I do recommend reading in order because although we could wander down a side trail or sprint forward, choosing our own adventure within and across the nineteen essays of varying lengths and terrains that make up Dear Park Ranger, it’s clear Muse has done the hard work of mapping a thoughtful trail. It’s also clear from the trailhead that we can trust Muse not only as an expert of woods and stream, but also as a passionate reader and student of the essay—all tools he uses to make sense of himself as a son, husband, and man on this lifelong journey: 

I write, you’ll see, to self-interrogate, to ground truth inner terrain. Or to paraphrase Joan Didion, I write to figure out what I think. “What I want and what I fear,” she said.

Jeff Muse has lived all over the U.S. working as a park ranger, environmental educator, and historical interpreter. Muse knows things—and when he doesn’t know? He tries to find out. And the deepest, truest question of all, as the child of divorce, the son of an alcoholic who died too soon, a wounded kid who morphed into an insecure teen who grew into a “fatherless, childless Hoosier who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay put”—is Who am I and how do I want to live? 

Throughout my life, no matter where I’ve lived, manhood has been a kind of topographic map. Yet it’s peer pressure or social norms telling me which route to follow: Smile, Jeff, have a beer. Make babies. Make lots of money. Buy yourself a leaf blower. Hang out at parties. Lighten up. . . . The word [essai] is also a journey—to seek out, examine, prove. But prove what to whom, I wonder, and why does it matter anyway? 

Muse even questions the questions themselves. As patient and as serious-minded as these essays can be—taking on tough subjects like masculinity and aging, racism and white fragility—Muse’s meticulously written scenes can also be hilarious. In “Trail Blazers,” an essay that takes on a particularly intense period of searching for Muse, he joins a group of friends to participate in a ritual sweat, and the young Navajo man preparing the white men to enter the sweat lodge hands them a scrap of cloth from which they’re each to tear a thin strip and says, “Tie that around your foreskin to seal your penis. . . . You can’t drip any semen in the sweat lodge. It’s a sacred place.” Young Jeff is flummoxed, standing there naked and mortified, fiddling with his string, so his friend Kurt tries to help:

“Just wrap it like a present,” Kurt said, revealing the progress he’s made. The fabric dangled against his pubic hair and the pale skin of his gangly legs . . . His penis indeed looked like a gift, topped off with a bright white bow. 

I laughed out loud, but in a Muse essay there’s always a forward pull, and as the heat, the rhythm of the chanting, and his own panic continues to rise in the lodge, Jeff is nose down and crawling—hunting for air, driven by this singular need, stripped absolutely bare in a collection in which everyone is always searching for something—identity, purpose, air.

The titular essay, “Dear Park Ranger,” a love letter to Muse’s wife, Paula, appears at the end of the book. In this essay, Muse makes a confession: after weighing backpacks and finding that Paula’s is heavier, he surreptitiously rebalanced the weight because he “wanted to be the man”—and even as he does this, knowing she’s fully capable of bearing more weight, he’s hyperaware of his own insecurity—and ashamed. Here we find the center of this collection—love. Muse remembers their first date, a hike through the snow, him following behind, admiring the view, when Paula shouts, “Look, glacier lilies!”

You plucked a petal gently, tore it in half, and handed me a piece. “Try it,” you said. “Tastes like sweet corn.”

I placed the creamy sliver on my tongue, chewing slowly, timidly at first. You were right: a taste from a summertime garden, something I’d known countless times back in Indiana.

“Reminds me of home,” I said, though in that moment, I wanted nothing of cornfields and flat farmland, and certainly nothing of football. I wanted the mountains. I wanted to hike. I wanted to find every wildflower. I wanted you.

There are so many great stories here. In Muse’s “An Ark of the Heart,” a twenty-something Jeff reads the book jacket that tells him that his literary and environmental hero Gary Snyder teaches “literature and wilderness thought” at UC Davis—and so Jeff gets in his car and drives. He shows up at Snyder’s office, gets in line with the other students, and I’m nervous for him: “He was my literary and environmental hero. Could I simply walk up and chat?” But—spoiler alert!—when Jeff’s the last one standing at the office door, Snyder invites him in, asks him first what plants are blooming in Western Washington where Muse began his drive. They talked about bioregionalism—“the notion of defining our lives by ecological zones”— and Muse tells us he’s been studying Snyder’s idea of “a sense of place” ever since. We shouldn’t always meet our heroes, but for Jeff, on that day, his days-long drive ended in a conversation that would guide the rest of his life.

“Subject: Advice for Tree Huggers” is one of the formally playful essays in this collection, a letter to the students in Muse’s ENV 303 to prepare them for a short field trip— “a mile-long ramble up a slushy trail”:  

You’ll never regret a hike. If there’s anything I would prioritize for a sustainable life, a life devoted to the environment, to caring for it, it’s time out of doors. Out of walls. Out of ceilings. It’s time to get muddy, slushy, sweaty. You will not care for what you do not know. Start now. Start knowing it.

And I am trying. I will try. Reading the extraordinary essays in Dear Park Ranger makes me happy. As we wander these geographies with Muse, he shows us the world with curiosity and attention buzzing. For me, this whole book is a lesson in leaning in—into the natural world, yes, but also into what looking outward can tell us about what’s going on in our own hearts as we figure out who we want to be in this world, how we want to love, and what we want to leave behind. 

[Travel tip: I hope you’ll visit Jeff Muse’s author site, learn more about the most recent chapter of his life that has brought him home to Indiana to battle cancer, and chart a course to one of his book events this summer. You’ll be so glad you did.]

Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by Daniel Mendelsohn

1 / One thing we learn from the later-in-life memoir, or the personal essay writ long, is that it allows us to see the many digressive routes we’ve followed only after a good deal of life has resulted in our “ending up” on any one of these routes, a place much different than where we thought we’d be. Soren Kierkegaard spoke of living life forward, understanding it in retrospect, and Carl Jung said, “One finds one’s destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.” Fate never fails us; it’s got our welfare in mind, but bugger that it is, won’t reveal the plot until, well, it’s time. Because of our unexpected “off ramps,” we need to wait a while and then we may recognize a plan—perhaps the plan—that provides us with some sense of meaning. At times, a pattern to our directionlessness emerges, and anyone, even fools, can say it’s been predesigned. Think of Donald Trump assessing his 78 years (I know it’s a stretch) as a kind of Destiny: the TV brand, elected President on a fluke, convinced that he’s America’s Lord and Fricking Savior.

Is there a book in Western literature that best embodies our meaning-hidden meanders? For Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of humanities and classical literature at Bard College and Editor-at-Large for The New York Review of Books, it’s Homer’s The Odyssey. His study of this epic Greek narrative, unique as an oral and written document, produced Three Rings. In it, the author juxtaposes a scholar’s memoir beside analyses of Homer’s tale-telling force in the work of several classic authors. The book’s contents were given by Mendelsohn as three talks in 2019 as the Page-Barbour Lectures at his alma mater, the University of Virginia.

Two years prior, he published An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. There, he tells the buddy story of his and his elderly father’s tour of the Mediterranean by ship, tracing Odysseus’s route home after the Trojan War. (His father died shortly after its publication.) Counterbalancing that and other personal losses, Three Rings is buffeted by a different wind. With complexity and grace, the author unfurls his sails to chart the narrative artistry of The Odyssey, a model for countless novels and nonfictions, written centuries apart and rooted in the Homeric vein.

In a short, 116-page book, he begins by distinguishing opposing literary structures, one, the Bible, the other, The Odyssey. The Bible framework is the brainchild of Erich Auerbach, a German Jew, whose Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature and the conditions in which he wrote the 1946 work comprise the first of the three rings or texts Mendelsohn dissects. In the spotlight is the story of Auerbach’s exile to Istanbul where, forbidden access to the local library, he wrote, perhaps, the seminal study of narrative art based solely on a few dozen canonic texts he’d stashed in his suitcase.

The Bible, Auerbach says, is written in the “Hebrew style.” Its form is chronological, events are reported as facts, unblemished anecdotes, devoid of drama; its procedural plots and faith-bred justifications are inscrutable, with nary an interpretive interruption and no sense of a controlling point-of-view. Abraham will do what God tells him—kill his son, Issac, without a reason from God and without His chosen slayer questioning the order. Once Abraham’s told to stand down, nothing of his relief or joy accompanies the scene. Readers ask, what does it mean? The answer for some goes beyond the obvious injunction of pure faith and, instead, codifies the insidious nature of religious evil.

The other primal narrative, in the “Greek style,” is the ring composition and, again, under Auerbach’s lens, Homer, the Greek culture’s collectivized author, is its herald. Here is free-form literary invention, all events hyper-dramatically “staged” with metaphoric additions, exaggerated and fantastic escapades, a participatory narrator whose survival skill is adaptation, a nitty-gritty concentration on lived experience, and, most important for Mendelsohn, the ring technique: “the insertion within one story of other stories, the flash backward or forward in time in order to give depth and complexity to the primary narrative.”

The form at work may follow the traditional path—rising action culminating in a climax, as in Freitag’s pyramid—but, more often, circles around that core event, obliquely, with devil-may-care disregard of the “rules.” In essence, the way many of us like to tell stories.

It’s not a wild claim to say that countering the Bible’s rigid obscurity launched literature on its winding course. Among its lasting methods is the ring, which Mendelsohn calls “a convoluted manner of composing.” While the Bible can stun with its knife-edged verse, elegant parallelism, metered music, and accentual stresses—the King James version, the seedbed of English poetry—its 66 books are invariant in style, a plodding tractor of flat chronicle, patriarchal tedium, moral commands, and coercive violence. Are we to trust that God is its reliable narrator?

Some of that can be said of The Odyssey. But it is, instead, composed. Its shape is like a river—gravity’s meandering whose current-swift variations are its path. That path delimits the idea (albeit, the male prerogative) of roving, postwar, over sea and land, heroes facing down villains. In fact, the Greek word for drift is polytropos—“of many turns”—one of the more finessable figures of speech. Such figures we know as schemes or tropes. To oppose or twist for literary effect, such devices “turn” a word or phrase from its normal syntax or its typical meaning. “How honorable is the man who never lies” shifts the usual syntax, a scheme, while “Brutus is an honorable man” shifts the phrase’s denotation, saying he is what he is not, a trope.

Writers’ tropes, used as commonly or greater than schemes, are what’s literary in oral and written narratives. An epic—from Homer to your mother’s memoir about her wild days in Greenwich Village in the 1960s—is, or is, potentially, polytropic—versatile, multi-themed, heterodox, wandering (purposefully mixing the written now with the lived then), and, if the writer can flair, laced with more than an occasional seam of guile, subtext, and surprise.

To underscore the Greek style, Mendelsohn’s trek cites the work of two authors (the other two rings) who “internalized” the Homeric scaffold of narration and renewed the ring idea for their eras. First is the French theologian Francois de Salignac de La Mother-Fénelon’s 1699 The Adventures of Telemachus, which dramatizes Odysseus’s son’s search for his father (as his father searched nine years for his home), including a trip to the Land of the Dead. Fénelon’s was the most famous novel of his time, eclipsed nearly a century later by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

And third—though not before he excurses through Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its “fantastically elaborated series of narrations and digressions . . . exhaustively treated in the course of the novel’s four thousand pages”—Mendelsohn unpacks one of the most lauded contemporary nonfiction novels or, I’m tempted to write, autofictions: W. G. Sebald’s 1995 The Rings of Saturn: history, novel, travelogue, memoir, take your pick.

On a walking tour of Suffolk County in England, Sebald meditates on a host of subjects, which, Mendelsohn notes, are “nothing but digressions,” organized around the German exile’s gloomy meditation on fairly recent, historic “traces of destruction”: the mass death of Congolese by Belgian capitalists; a Dutch elm disease that pockmarked the English countryside in the 1970s; a caretaker’s reminiscence about British airfields from which planes took off and dropped “seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons” of bombs on Germany. For their effort, England lost 9,000 British aircraft and 50,000 men. Of all this wasting, of “the failure of narrative” to render it, and of “the irretrievability of the past,” Mendelsohn writes,

As you make your way through [Sebald’s] twisting narratives, it becomes ever more difficult to escape the impression that the circling merely exhausts us while never bringing us any closer to the subject.

2 / I noted that Three Rings is as erudite as it is memoiristic. Tributes to beloved authors observe Mendelsohn’s interests (and ours), but the emotional pitch is unmistakable. Such is his desire to quell or calm his own life’s rapture with the canon or, better, the canonical. He describes his several struggles while drafting the book about his and his father’s trip. One path out of that sinkhole was reading Auerbach’s Mimesis—a summons in which the art of narrative analysis is masterfully done—and there Mendelsohn discovered the ring form, in essence, saving him from endless indecision. He saw that if a writer gets lost in the writing, it’s not the subject’s fault but a bog of a different order. His muddle came from back-to-back, exhaustive books—the father-son adventure and his struggle, a decade earlier, to complete the 500-page grief memorial, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, in 2006.

As a summary, here’s the opening of my 2007 review of The Lost in Fourth Genre:

Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost is the story of his search for six relatives, his grandfather’s brother’s family, who were killed in the Holocaust. The search is ocean-going and slow to unfold, held back yet pushed on by its watery domain. The book presents a handful of memories from a handful of survivors and witnesses, many over eighty, from one Polish town. Yet even the mealiest of recollections carry a mystery—and it is this mystery about what might have happened to the six that has aggrieved others and consumes Mendelsohn. The book is a testament to, and an enactment of, the trappings of memory’s rituals: how we linger, defend, indulge, and exhaust what we hope to believe about the past and what we must relinquish as speculation.

In Three Rings, Mendelsohn returns to the emotional turmoil of writing The Lost. He dwells on years of research and interviews, the horror of imagining his family’s murder, which were not the product of a Nazi “labor camp, but a death camp.” Reconstructing likely scenarios took a toll on him, a pain he was slow to confront. In fact, he admits to a “kind of breakdown.” The only time he cried was in Tel Aviv at an exhibit of models of actual synagogues built around the world across centuries of the Jewish diaspora. Why did the tears flow there? As a child, he built models of Greek temples, which, beside (or like) literature, shaped his precocious interests in classical scholarship. Still, those synagogue models—and not the tales he heard from a few Polish and Ukrainian survivors of the camps—brought his heart to its knees and, at last, triggered a sorrow that he had not dealt with.

Each book seems to open up aspects of himself that Mendelsohn buried in order to finish each book. The buried child here is his lifelong fear: being trapped in a cave. He details his claustrophobia, his terror of enclosure as a child and an adult, then traces it to the Calypso chapter in The Odyssey where the hero and his men are kept, chained and enthralled, for seven years, Odysseus, Calypso’s “love-prisoner.” An act of self-liberation, writing a book about the literary efforts of others who in order to grow must battle their confinement may bring us to battle the same in ourselves.

The beauty of Three Rings is that Mendelsohn discovers his way by writing a polytropic book, one that demonstrates the form of its composition as the project develops and he follows. A practicing preacher, he offers new material and goes back to it, repeatedly, reassessing its quirks and questions in light of whatever fresh turns he’s compelled or game to take.

To apply “convolution” as a form for contemporary nonfiction (one bailiwick of River Teeth’s publishing mission) should not be missed. In the best critical essays and memoirs, nonfictionists mix our meandering uncertainties, our ghosts always on the guest list. These are spirits we include on the journey because they provoke our wisdom and our daring. It may be helpful to know that when we choose the Bible style—for its enigmatic detachment with reality—or the Greek—for its intimate dismemberment of reality—neither path alone will be free of tension because each path is shadowed by what its opposing path keeps for itself.

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