THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13WE DOG PEOPLEare incorrigible, so after
dutifully reading the first few essays in
Claire Messud’s new book in order, I of
course skipped ahead to the one titled “Our
Dogs.”
Its opening sentence — “People react
differently to our canine situation” — wor-
ried me: Who has a canine situation as op-
posed to too many dogs, too few, tongue-
lolling angels or fang-baring devils? What
a technical locution. What a cold one.
I was given even more pause on the next
page, where Messud devotes an entire
paragraph to the “holistic foulness” of her
dachshund’s stench. Where was this essay
going? And was I supposed to be enjoying
it?
Eight pages later — pages, I should add,
that went by with steadily increasing logic
and ease — I was reading the last words,
flicking away a tear and nodding gently at
her question: “How does our strife with the
dogs differ from our general strife: Could it
not be said that our canine situation is sim-
ply our life situation?” It could, and while it
could be said more colloquially than in this
odd and oddly affecting rumination, it re-
ally couldn’t be said a whole lot better.
[ Read an excerpt from “Kant’s Little
Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I
Write.” ]
“Our Dogs” is one of about 25 essays in
“Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other
Reasons Why I Write,” and it’s in many
ways emblematic — the elegance of it, the
challenge of it. Messud isn’t a writer who
grabs her subject matter by the throat or
pumps her prose full of kinetic energy. She
moseys, she circles, she lies in wait. She
sighs where others might scream, mists up
where others might sob, ponders “holistic
foulness” where others might just run for
the cleaner-smelling hills.
But more often than not, it works.
There’s usually a moral in her sights, one
worth getting to, and there’s sometimes a
deceptively strong current of feeling be-
neath a surface of reserve. I didn’t gobble
these essays down, as I would a bucket of
buttered popcorn. I savored them in un-
hurried spoonfuls, as with a bowl of glis-
tening consommé. And I felt amply fed.
I’m speaking in large part of the first sec-
tion of the book, which is the heart of it. It’s
called “Reflections” and comprises essays
that, like “Our Dogs,” are essentially snip-
pets of memoir, with the exception of two,
“How to Be a Better Woman in the Twenty-
First Century” and “The Time for Art Is
Now,” that are more topical, political and
not especially memorable. The book’s sec-
ond section, “Criticism: Books,” is slightly
longer, while its third and last section,
“Criticism: Images,” is the shortest of all.
Nearly all of these essays have been pub-
lished before, in places as diverse as
Vogue, Granta, Kenyon Review and The
New York Review of Books.
Messud is best known to readers not for
nonfiction like this but for fiction, espe-
cially “The Emperor’s Children,” her ex-
ploration of three young strivers (of sorts)
in New York City in the prelude to 9/11.
Count me among the many happy readers
who found that novel an indelible portrait
of a certain kind of entitlement, a certain
cast of ambition, and of the laughable, piti-
able chasms between who we are, who we
expect to be and who we really want to be.
It was packed with cutting social observa-
tions and, even more so, with wisdom.
These essays don’t carry the same
weight or deliver the same punch, perhaps
because they don’t enjoy the free rein of
imagination. They’re confined by the pa-
rameters of Messud’s own life and the lives
of the writers and artists she examines in
her criticism. But a similar intelligence
courses through them, coupled with an er-
udition that, unfortunately, tilts into exhibi-
tionism. If you played a drinking game in
which you took a shot every time you
tripped across an invocation of Tolstoy, Na-
bokov, T. S. Eliot or the like, you’d be tipsy
just a few paragraphs into some essays
and blotto by the end of others.
Messud’s literary criticism is more ab-
sorbing than her arts criticism and its ap-
peal is proportional to a reader’s familiar-
ity with the subject. I’m less versed in Al-
bert Camus than I should be, even now that
we’re living “The Plague,” so the three es-
says about his work — written long before
the coronavirus — mattered less to me
than her vivid, insightful analyses of three
novels that I read in the recent past and re-
member well: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never
Let Me Go,” Magda Szabo’s “The Door”
and Teju Cole’s “Open City.”
The beginning of her take on “Open
City” demonstrates her great talent for en-
larging the context of whatever she’s writ-
ing about and weaving in astute bits of
broader commentary. It also captures her
determinedly elevated tone and vocabu-
lary, which won’t be to every reader’s
taste: “In our age of rapid technology and
the jolly, undiscriminating ephemeralizing
of culture and knowledge, an insistence
upon high stakes — a desire to ask the big
questions — can seem quaint, or passé, or
simply a little embarrassing.”
The ending of her take on “The Door”
demonstrates her even greatertalent for
bringing her essays to a poignant, haunt-
ing close, with a few final phrases that dis-till the meaning of all that preceded them
and send a kind of shudder through your
mind and heart. If she were a gymnast,
she’d be renowned for sticking her land-
ings.
The essays in “Reflections” reflect a
background that is geographically expan-
sive, privileged and bereft of big, messy
drama — the word “genteel” kept popping
into my brain. “Like many of us, I’m a mon-
grel, a hybrid, made up of many things,”
she writes in the title essay. “My childhood
was itinerant, my identity complicated. My
father was French, my mother Canadian. I
grew up in Sydney, Australia; in Toronto,
Canada; and then at boarding school in the
United States. I went to graduate school at
Cambridge University, where I met my
British husband.” That doesn’t make Mes-
sud the most relatable narrator, but it af-
fords her a panoramic perch and allows
her, for example, to take readers on an ex-
tensive, evocative tour of Beirut in “The
Road to Damascus.”
With that essay and others, she explores
two themes — two conflicts — in particu-
lar: the impermanence of human circum-
stances versus the durability of art, andthe evanescence of experience versus the
tenacity of memory. In her memory, her
mother and her father’s sister live large; so
she immortalizes them in “Two Women,”
about what strange bedfellows some in-
laws make. A long-ago friend’s disappear-
ance endures as a lesson in people’s inscru-
tability that she imparts in “Teenage
Girls.”
Messud makes the point that every rela-
tionship we’ve had and every residence
that we’ve inhabited survives in the scrap-
books that constitute ourselves: We leave
them far behind and never leave them at
all. “It is wrong to think of them as past:
Sydney, then, was just beginning; and To-
ronto was, in our lives, a constant, and
then, for a time, a home; just as Toulon, my
father’s family’s chosen place, remained
until just a few years ago my life’s one un-
broken link,” she writes in “Then.” “They
were concurrent presents, and presences,
and somehow because of this, and magi-
cally, they have remained always present.
If I crossed the ocean today, would I not
find my childhood friends dangling from
the monkey bars, their ties flailing and
their crested hats in a pile upon the grass?”
Now those friends, those monkey bars,
those ties and those hats exist not just in
her thoughts but in these pages, where
they’re fixed forever. That’s why Messud
writes. It gives the past a future. 0Time Regained
A writer looks back on the art that made her who she is.
By FRANK BRUNI
KANT’S LITTLE PRUSSIAN HEAD
AND OTHER REASONS WHY I WRITE
An Autobiography in Essays
By Claire Messud
336 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $25.95.
Claire MessudPHOTOGRAPH BY LUCIAN WOOD
There’s usually a moral in Messud’s
sights, and a strong current of
feeling beneath a surface of reserve.FRANK BRUNI,a Times Op-Ed columnist, writes
about politics, popular culture, food and gay
rights.