There are times, though, when I am not so feral. Reading is mostly a bust. Books fail. They fail to pinch my nerve.

Reading requires conviction. I try to find a spark that sets my brain ablaze. I fail, mostly.

A few weeks ago my energy had waned. I needed a shot in the arm, a book that would affirm my effort and push me forth. Good books lead to a good life. That is what I needed to hear, again. I yearned to feel the swell, again.

I turned to David Ulin, no stranger to the slog. The title of his new book, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, provoked me. By reading it I hoped to regain my mojo. Ulin, a book critic by trade, is like me a lover of literature, but the advent of digital culture, he says, has affected all of us in a particular way: Close reading has become difficult.

Ulin’s teenaged son Noah thinks books are dead. He is reading The Great Gatsby and isn’t jazzed about it. Ulin, understandably, is concerned for both himself and his kin. He laments the loss of silence in our lives. I understand. There are days when I dream of a chair in an otherwise empty room. Some of the best moments of my life have been spent alone.

Like me, Ulin was a devoted reader as a teenager. Books filled him with wonder, made him feel like “the world had opened up in the palm of [his] hands. It is this that draws us to books in the first place, their nearly magical power to transport us to other landscapes, other lives.” Though Ulin is old enough to be my dad, I can sympathize with his nostalgia. What a time, my teenaged years! I, too, consumed books at a fast clip. But that pace shows why some perspective is necessary. When I was a teen, fried food, Tom Clancy, and sweatpants were amazing. My penis, keep in mind, was in a constant state of erection.

Why is youth held in such high regard? Youth represents in our memories a time when joy was free of work. We were—and this is Ulin quoting Frank Conroy—“free to drift into fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than [our] own.” The wrong word here is free. “Free” can just as easily mean free of taste. Free of values. Free of effort. Free of those damn clunky things that ruin our damn reading experiences.

Ulin’s urge to return to the time when he “read quickly and without interruption” concerns me. He seems to lament not silence but swiftness. I, too, want to feel a buzz, but I have no illusions. It takes big effort. Reading good books requires discipline. And by “good books” I don’t mean “good plots” or “good times.” Good books challenge us, and like all things important they require work. Serendipity is a crock of shit.

Look no further than professional sports. Occasionally, an athlete will break protocol and complain about the slog. Really? we ask. You make the long dollar, millions at that, and you have the gall to bitch about a game as I sit here in my cube working on a data presentation? But an athlete’s high, realize, is much higher than the high you feel when trotting around the bases in your company’s softball league. Herein lies the problem: In order to feel that joy, athletes must train. It takes conviction. Joy never precedes work—it is the result of work. After they feel that big joy, the work can seem like a grind, a slog. Joy appears, it fleets, its return date is unknown. Routine is the enemy of spontaneity. But as any great improviser knows, there is no jazz without practice. Joy is a job.

David Ulin

Distraction, as many have noted, is easier. Hyperlinks are fussing with our brain syntax. In the near future books will smell not of sap but alloy. Some philistines already prefer gadgets to God. A distracted clan we are, moving from screen to screen, filling our domes with facts and data, as good books lie dead or dying.

Distraction, some say, is adaptive, a product of evolution. Brains developed the ability to improvise. If you were, say, a hunter, it was best to keep one eye out for grizzly bears. Response to stimuli saves lives, especially when we are minding a toddler or carrying a firearm. Every so often it’s best to be alert.

But books aren’t bears. They rarely attack.

Ulin nails the need for contemplation, but he misses the mark about technology. A jones for gossip is, at its core, no different than a zeal for good books. In this context our mass consumption of information seems a rational act. Media of all sorts provide quantity. We consume facts and tidbits because we are curious. Information satisfies an innate urge. Technology, then, is not a crime but an alibi. Easy access allows for easy plunder. Control is ours. But it’s curiosity at a bargain price.

Ulin, thankfully, knows that quality lies not in the medium but the message. A grainy video of a performance by Björk could make my skull feel soft, whereas a book about bears, though fascinating, would not make my heart twitch.

It isn’t about technology—it’s about conviction.

Goods books aren’t rad. That, simply, is why people do not read them. They are difficult. A little bit of learning, said Alexander Pope, is a dangerous thing. The danger here is that once you feel the ecstatic, you want to feel it more and more. You want to feel undead, again. But if language has ever made your knees buckle, you know it takes big effort. Say you are reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. At first the syntax perplexes you. The words are heavy with modernist portent. All those dependent clauses impede the flow. Commas, you think, are overrated. Take a look. In this passage, a young boy, James, awaits his family’s trip to a lighthouse:

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition was bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsey, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy.

Virginia Woolf

The words are, at first, a trod. The first sentence wants to push forth but the commas stall the progress. The end, it seems, is “within touch” but the sentence keeps us waiting. But James, with his gnarled feelings, is waiting too. The next sentence finds its eloquence and sprawls. The point of view shifts indirectly to the mother. These are her feelings. And then there’s that last sentence, the claptrap that snaps the tongue: “It was fringed with joy.” Those five words, as Emily Dickinson would say, Deal-One-Imperial-Thunderbolt. It was fringed with joy. Those five words make my brain go goo.

Virginia Woolf is my wife and my foe. I love her for these types of sentences—but I hate her, for in her light all else pales. She stalks me. At times I wish we’d never met. The pictures have been burned. I’ve hidden Mrs. Dalloway in the stacks, only to find The Waves staring back at me. She taunts me. Her sentences—they tap at my brain. That fine English lady refuses to hear my pleas. She won’t quit me.

I don’t know how to explain the sensation. Here’s Ulin on the time he visited the place where Malcolm Lowry set Under the Volcano:

This is how good Lowry was, I remember thinking, and this is what language, at its most acute, can do. It can collapse the distances, bring us into not just the thoughts but also the perceptions of a writer, allow us, however fleetingly, to inhabit, literally, his or her eyes.

That doesn’t cut it for me. The first part is agreeable but the rest seems too easy. Language is mentioned but never explored. Reading appears, in turn, as a passive experience, absent of art and genius. There’s no mention of craft, the shaper of our consciousness. It’s all experience.

Reading rarely delivers. As Samuel Beckett wrote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Ulin gets the buzz and the joy, sure, but he leaves out the rigor: “The best we can hope for are a few transcendent moments, in which we bridge the gap of our loneliness and come together with another human being.” I agree with the transcendent bit but disagree with the connection part. Books are not people. They are no friends of mine. When I first read Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace, whom Ulin and I both count as favorites, I felt unbalanced. I felt influenced, yes, but in a punch drunk sort of way. I don’t want to be swayed too easily.

Reading is not an “excavation of the inner world.” It’s a lonely plunge into the unsaid. There’s no doubt that we want to enrich our lives with something. Books, though, will not “blur the boundaries that divide us, that keep us separate or apart.” Sure, we all want to feel connected in every sense of the word. We all want to feel the buzz. But we can’t have both the sensation and the shoptalk. In between, compromise lurks.

As William James wrote:

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest experience is utter chaos.

Conviction is selective interest. The more I attend to good books the less I have to say. That is why good books transcend most experiences. They are private, in the truest sense of the word.

Reading is, to me, a faithful pursuit of an abstract essence. Joy, then, is a rare emotion.

I plod through the nothing new hoping to see a flash that shocks me still.

I want to live in the space between a weep and a scream.

I want to love something with all my bones.

I want to feel my brain go goo.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

If only I could tell you the rest.

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In his new collection of essays, Listen to This, Alex Ross writes about the type of person I was five years ago. I was what the crusaders for classical music call a “culturally aware non-attender.” I talked about Virginia Woolf as if she were my girlfriend. Björk made me swoon. I nearly wept at my first Radiohead concert. I could kill the mood with a discussion about the mise-en-scène in European art films. But if you asked me about Gustav Mahler, I would roll my eyes. Classical music smelled of mothballs and elitism—why attend a performance with a bunch of folks who wear tweed and love early-bird specials?

Ross uses the techniques of memoir, journalism, and criticism to remind us that music is music. He profiles subjects such as Björk, Bob Dylan, and Radiohead, and reexamines the work of Verdi, Brahms, Mozart, and Schubert. There are also histories of music recordings and, in one of the collection’s best essays, a genealogy of the lamenting bass line of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” that goes back four centuries. Whether the music is classical or popular, Ross urges us to search for the moments when the familiar becomes strange.

In the title essay, Ross describes his evolution as a music lover. He grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, but at heart he was a child of the 1930s and 1940s, the decades when classical music was at its middlebrow peak. Instead of Pink Floyd and Dylan, he listened to Mahler and Beethoven. The formative album of his musical life was not Dark Side of the Moon or Blood on the Tracks; it was Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. The music begins in the key of E-flat but, ten seconds in, a C-sharp “waylays” the main theme. Leonard Bernstein described the moment as “stab of intrusive otherness.” To a modern listener the note is not, as Ross admits, the shock it once was; on first listen you won’t clutch your chest and spill your wine on the carpet. But that brief and elusive C-sharp goes to the heart of Ross’s pursuit as a critic: He is always looking to relive that moment of surprise.

Alex Ross

Those moments are most evident in his essays about “popular” music. When Björk was recording her album Medúlla, Ross visited the singer in Reykjavik and Salvador and New York. He gives us an overview of her career, but as he searches for the signposts that lead to her otherness the essay grows lyrical; it’s no surprise that his search leads to classical music. He settles on her untrained voice, which he compares to that of Maria Callas, the famous opera singer. Björk, like Callas, has the uncanny ability to combine “precision of pitch with force of feeling.” Her uniqueness lies in her voice’s flexibility. At its extremes, it can evoke the purity of a choirboy and the growl of a lion. Björk is an exceptional singer who can convey a variety of emotions in a single breath, but it’s the slight imperfection of her voice—the trembling ‘rrrrrrrr’—that makes hearts thump.

Ross’s approach is all the more refreshing because so many writers have a tendency to lead discussions away from the music. Mozart, for example, has fallen victim to psychology, with scholars, biographers, and musicologists long arguing about the composer’s personality and its effect on his music. Does it really matter if Mozart was a genius or an outcast, a punk, a hooligan, or a tortured soul? In an effort to move beyond the myths, Ross spent three months listening to Mozart. As a result, the music becomes a “storm of style” in which comedy and tragedy, happiness and despair, and the sacred and the profane, coexist as one.

The Mozart essay shows how Ross’s obligations as a journalist strengthen his skills as an essayist. Unlike, say, a scholar who traces the use of E-flat throughout Mozart’s oeuvre, Ross, a staff writer for The New Yorker, blends in info about the composer’s background and biography, in that way appealing to both the novice and the expert. He summarizes and synthesizes information, as any journalist does, always veering from the general to the specific—and ending at the music.

And he’s at his best when he ventures into memoir and expresses what other critics choose to avoid. Music is emotional, and so too is criticism. In an essay about the evolution of recorded music and its impact on performance, he ends with an impassioned list of both live and recorded music that had an emotional impact on him. From the 400 singers in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony to the six musicians who played in a church under an Austrian twilight, to his LPs of Beethoven’s Eroica and Mahler’s Sixth, music is Ross’s autobiography.

Listen to This, as implied by its title, is a declaration. Its goal is to collapse the distinctions between the old and the new. Ross is an evangelist for serious music that stirs the emotions in strange ways. He shows that respect for the past can increase enthusiasm for the present. An appreciation for Messiaen or Stravinsky can enhance your understanding of Radiohead. A love of Maria Callas can increase your adoration of Björk. Music isn’t an either/or game, and music criticism should move beyond categories and classifications to focus on the moments when sameness gives way to otherness.

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In Andrea Scrima’s A Lesser Day, the narrator recollects a life in a continual state of unrest. Her unfinished paintings hang on walls in Berlin or Brooklyn; her belongings move from lofts to sublets, or remain behind in storage. Like the boxes, her memories are itinerant, traveling to the places she once lived—to the coal oven, to the exposed plumbing, to the heat pipes that clank, to the rain that pools beneath the skylight in a windowless loft. Wherever she resides, nothing seems to be in the right place: How to make sense of a life lived when its contents are scattered across countries and continents?

A Lesser Day is a restless book. On the first page, the narrator recalls entering her Berlin apartment after a two-week absence: “The sudden strangeness of the space, the strangeness of the plasterboard wall, so familiar and yet somehow too long, too high now.” That unhinged feeling is the book’s dominant mood. The narration switches frequently from past to present tense, and at the end of long sentences dangle modifiers such as “… but I didn’t know that yet.” These techniques enhance the book’s restive quality, allowing Scrima and her readers to experience the flow of images in something closer to real-time than hindsight. As a result, there’s plenty of uncertainty, the narrator’s memories remaining as much a mystery to her as they are to us.

Yet, those memories are full of detail and imagery. Here she is remembering a summer when she and her brother were children:

We spent all our free time together, glued to each other’s side, entire summers under water in the pool out back, the skin on our feet shriveling, our finger tips shriveling, jumping up and down wildly in the water and making waves, higher and higher, pulling ourselves up onto the edge of the pool and throwing ourselves back in, laughing and shrieking and jumping wildly and pretending we were at high sea, shipwrecked, exhilarated, the water splashing over the edge of the pool and flooding the ground below.

The details are lush, and the passage moves. The excess of verbs—shriveling, jumping, laughing, shrieking, splashing—lend the writing a sense of excitement and change. Yet, the memory lacks a conclusion. There isn’t a hint of sentimentality. There’s no circling back to admire the image of the shriveled feet and fingertips. There’s no lesson learned, only other stories, other memories. However lush, the memories aren’t made to cohere.

Andrea Scrima

As the narrator of A Lesser Day strives for a connection, the purpose of the book remains unsettled. What’s clear is that the narrator is a middle-aged woman, an artist, who has lost a father some time ago, maybe years and years ago; the book, a novel or a memoir or both, is an attempt to connect, somehow. Despite their open-endedness, her memories gather momentum through direct address to an unnamed “you,” which comes and goes like a leitmotif. Her dead father, a lost lover or two, a former version of herself—the “you” takes on many personalities. Memory, as it turns out, is a form of conversation, like a prayer to the lost or the dead, who never talk back.

So, why strive to make sense of it all, when the subjects in her memories are elusive? Maybe memory is like the layers and layers of paint brushed on her unfinished canvases, or the loops and loops of telephone-hold music begun at different points, “but always the same celestial symphony, chopped into segmented sequences and pieced together again imperfectly.” Or maybe memory is like carrying an Instamatic camera for days,

anticipating the moment when I would find what I was waiting for and press the little red button, once each day, one photograph each day… On some days I found nothing at all, having waited too long and the light having grown too dim, but I always took the picture anyway, even though the film couldn’t record much more than a murky blur; a lesser day.

Or maybe memory is what T.S. Eliot describes in “Little Gidding,” a portion of which appears as the book’s epigraph:

… see, now they vanish,

The faces and the places with the self which,

as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured,

in another pattern.

Maybe it’s more about the process than the progress. Though she circles around the memory of a dead father, reads his old journals, stares at his old pictures, the narrator of A Lesser Day may never know enough. But all isn’t lost. Maybe memory’s ability to renew and transfigure is more its allure than its curse. Maybe the effort and the concentration remind her of what matters most: people are the places she wants to go.

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From the first pages of his novel, Witz, it’s clear Joshua Cohen wants to challenge our hardwired taste for the prim and proper. He ignores the shrill voice that whispers in many a writer’s ear: “Make it neat. Beware of sprawl. Spit and polish those sentences as you would a fancy loafer…” For many writers, this is the voice of reason, saving them from unchecked ambition; but the downside to self-control is that it can pull us toward the safety and security of the status quo.

Considering this novel’s plot, it’s no surprise the author veers toward excess; the world he depicts is absurd. After a biblical plague, all the Jews—referred to as the “Affiliated”—die, save the first-born sons, whom the government corrals and interns on Ellis Island. Among the living is Benjamin Israelian, born bearded and bespectacled, an adult-sized and readymade savior. Soon after, the survivors meet their demise, leaving Ben as the lone Jew in a world that heralds him as a Messiah. A reluctant celebrity, Ben skips town and travels the country, through its deserts and woods and beyond. So the chase begins: Ben becomes the hunted.

Cohen matches the absurdist plot with freewheeling prose. At times, the writing seems out of control; clauses and phrases try to unhinge from the punctuation that bolts them in place. The words fight to keep hold as the sentences buck and buck:

Him turning the place upsidedown, insideout, and for nothing; Him searching, setting aside, in a fit, a maddening raising of heirloom dust. This basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished—its lowliest beetles and spiders and worms, its annelids dumb, search through the abandoned for meaning, night and day; day and night, making their ways through whatever remains. To seek out any prophecy left to rot by the rotted—to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death.

In the above sentence, Ben sits alone among his dead family’s possessions. Here, emotion peeks through (“in a fit, a maddening raising of heirloom dust”). But no matter our narrator’s attempt to riff toward understanding (“the basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished”), ambiguity wins (“to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death”). In other words, the sentence doesn’t rumble toward consciousness; a riff pushes it apace, but it halts at the aphoristic ending.

Of course, this is Cohen’s intent. Each turn of phrase leads to the right. There’s no way out. But for every sentence like the one above, there are handfuls of the following:

Then, to begin with the work of the day, which is slaughtering, the killing of meat, the knifing of it into product, into cuts as numerously diverse as appetites, and as grossly disarticulated, irreconcilable: these eyes of all around seeing, beeves in crosscuts, sirloins and tenderloins, rear round, roasts of flank and shank, brisket and chuck, butterflychops flitting through the dim, evading the chops of blades swung high to scalp, held as long and disjointedly sharp as the teeth of a starveling God…

Joshua Cohen

The hyperrealist detail borders on the self-amused, and much of Witz is full of it, and purposely so: the excess of language mimics a world that values kitsch. Ben is heralded as a messiah. He is a cultural symbol, an instant celebrity. Judaism becomes the Next Big Thing. Observance of the Sabbath becomes law. Yarmulkes. Poland is renamed Polandland. Auschwitz is Whateverwitz. No wonder Ben is on the run—this is a world, not far from our own, in which the popular trumps all else. Everything is appropriated and then stripped of meaning. Judaism isn’t a faith, but side curls and matzo-ball soup. The sentences, therefore, pick up details until they lose all sense of what’s important.

And so the overwrought prose, the details that accumulate until we lose all sense of what’s important.

Unimaginable evil like the Holocaust may be beyond the grasp of art. Yet many have tried, to the point of exploitation. So it’s no wonder that Cohen, who’s been vocal about his intent, is quick to make life difficult for his readers, avoiding convention and sentimentality at all cost. But if he’s a martyr then he’s also an opportunist—in other words, he always has an alibi. However excessive and indulgent his prose, Cohen stays on message. But when the sole focus is excess, the liveliness of his sentences—the tone shifts, the wordplay, the puns, the riffing—is lost to this uniformity of purpose: to out-kitsch the kitsch. The energy of the prose begins to enervate itself, giving way to a glut of detail. Useless information becomes the king of nothing serious, and perceptiveness gives way to cynicism: “Up and down they kneel and they narrow, they straighten, they genuflect, bow up and down—as if this Group’s nothing but a congregation of marionettes.”

People as puppets. There isn’t much to believe in here—but maybe this is the point. If so, maybe my issue is with Cohen’s worldview. There’s no doubt he’s a serious writer, and a skilled one at that. It takes conviction to push an idea to its breaking point, to run the risk of a novel collapsing under its own heft. But I need more than elastic sentences. I need more than criticism. I need to walk away with faith. For faith is what drives difficult books, the feeling that if we hang in there, if we suffer the bouts of hardship, the experience will ultimately reward us in ways that simpler, more conventional novels can’t. Cohen’s refusal to smother his cynicism prevents his prose from stoking that faith, resting instead on the somewhat cheaper laurels of irreverence.

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There’s much at stake in The First Book. The first-time author wishes to make a good impression and, if things work out, to seduce the reader. The reader, for his or her part, hopes to love the book but looks for signs of weakness. Both parties are blind—there is no track record, no laurels; there is no critical lens. The writer covers up the bumps and bruises. The reader looks for poise and power. But if a first-timer appears sure and strong, most likely this is an illusion—beneath the polish, the writer, like the reader, is uncertain about the book’s performance and its fate.

In From Old Notebooks, Evan Lavender-Smith reveals what other writers, especially first-timers, try to hide: the influence, the bravado, the insecurity, the bravery, and the cowardice and the hubris of writing—all in the hope of creating something original.

From Old Notebooks is a collection of aphorisms, ranging from ideas for stories, novels, memoirs, and movies, to musings about books, sports, family, linguistics, and philosophy. At first the book seems like a notebook of jottings—from the mundane to the magnificent—revelations that hit the writer while in the car, at the library, or on the john. But as we attempt to find a narrative thread, we come to understand that the writer, Lavender-Smith’s proxy, is trying to make sense of it all, too. And from here the project emerges: the writer will turn his jottings into a book, a book which will be called From Old Notebooks. Let’s call it F.O.N.2.

The idea for the book is set, but it’s aim is unstable. The writer’s attempt to categorize the project is ongoing: is F.O.N.2 a journal? a memoir? a novel? a “memiovel”? This doubt lends the book its improvisatory feeling, turning the writer-character into a reader, a reader who must examine and interpret his own content, content that continually outpaces his own understanding of it.

Evan Lavender-Smith

The “plot” of the book is the evolution of its own creation.

At different points, the writer-character is concerned about F.O.N.2—Is this too cute or too smart? Will I finish it? Will I publish it? But he’s also a dreamer. He imagines a future book entitled The Illusion of Improvisation in American Literature from Kerouac to Lavender-Smith, wonders to whom he should dedicate the unfinished book, and schemes against his future literary executors. The sudden tonal shifts, from dread to dreams, portray this writer-character in different roles, from chump to champ. The reader’s response to all this is complex and fluid, too—the writer-character, as a personality, is elusive. Take for example the following series of thoughts culled at random, all of which deal with the writer’s family:

Will Jackson develop an aversion to books because his father neglected him on their account? Nearly every day now he grabs a book from my hands and speaks angrily, “Dada, stop reading!”

It hurts to wear my baseball glove with my wedding ring on.

To live in the white creases inside Sofia’s elbows, the backsides of her knees and knuckles.

Three things I would try my hardest to save were my house on fire: flash drive, baseball glove, first-edition Gravity’s Rainbow.

Three more: Carmen, Jackson, Sofia.

I am tempted to cut out that patch of skin from Sofia’s back containing her birthmark—crimson relief of Kauai—before it fades any further.

Jackson, pointing at a moth fluttering by: “A Life! A Life!”

The image of beauty that would instantly dispel all doubt—Jackson taking a bath, Carmen raising two fingers to her lips, empty autumn baseball field—for which I am constantly on the lookout and never able to resolve.

The writer-character, caught between freedom and family, is an exaggerator and a minimizer. He’s abstract and lucid, direct and indirect. He makes us shudder and swoon. The result is dynamic. As he wrestles with ideas about the book and his family, we reexamine our thoughts about the writer and the book. It’s a performance on both parts, a performance in which writer and reader have equal billing. Lavender-Smith isn’t afraid to let his guard down, to sit at the bottom of the tower, however long he daydreams about climbing it. He shows how a writer, like a reader, is always plodding in the muck, hoping to resolve the contradictions.

And if the job proves impossible, there are the creases and the birthmark and the son who sounds like Virginia Woolf: “A Life! A Life! ”

From Old Notebooks is many things: a meta-novel, a family memoir, an essay on form, a book about the First Book, an ode to self-reliance, a pillow book for aspiring writers. Above all, it’s a performance, a first book in which Evan Lavender-Smith plays his different roles, interprets his own lines, and practices his own voice—all in the hopes of emerging as himself.

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A familiar cast of characters populates John D’Agata’s new book-length essay, About a Mountain. Activists, apologists, hucksters, linguists, lobbyists, opportunists, politicians, and rationalists—all take part in the debate over whether to store our country’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, which stands about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, a suicide capital of the USA. If you keep up with politics, you won’t be shocked when facts get lost in the Senate’s formality. Or when stats abound but never match up. Or when everybody has opinions and the “science” to prove them true. Or when the Department of Energy (DOE) is the best improviser this side of Charlie Chaplin: Yucca is porous, you say? We’ll build a shield made of Alloy-22. Alloy-22 is corrosive? We have evidence to refute that—but sorry, those documents are classified.

I’m afraid that introduction likens D’Agata’s book to some stuffy tome about the eighth-grade dance we call the United States government, but that isn’t the case at all. On the contrary, About a Mountain avoids predetermined, pre-indexed conclusions. And smarty-pants rhetoric. And Clear Argument. And Evidence, put together in support of a Central Thesis. D’Agata’s book, in other words, is what people like me call capital-A Art.

Most of the book unfolds as follows: A scene plays out without commentary—no explaining, no editorializing. And then something sparks the writer’s curiosity, and the search for answers begins. Repeat.

After watching C-Span with his mother and her activist friends, D’Agata heads to the local mall, where between a Disney Store and a Cinnabons he finds Yucca’s informational center. Without a hint of irony, our writer describes the center, funded by the DOE, before shifting to a spokeswoman talking to students about her job correcting all the flubs in the local media. Here our writer supplies some information of his own: The DOE has wooed local teachers with nine hundred educational manuals, costing upwards of $800,000 to produce. The collage of story and fact continues: Information about Yucca’s porousness, and Alloy-22’s corrosiveness, is followed by a scene in which students use water bottles as containers, Silly Putty as Alloy-22, kitty litter as waste, and packing peanuts as a protective barrier, and try to form an airtight seal.

You can imagine the rest.

John D'Agata

Having been told that waste stored at Yucca will be “safe” after 10,000 years, D’Agata tries to find out how this number could be so neat and tidy—a simple question which leads him to multiple agencies, to numerous acts and policies, to nonprofits and science academies, and, after many dead-ends and referrals and I-don’t-knows, to a waste consultant, who answers our writer’s simple question—Is the number arbitrary?—with a yes. And a no.

This is what D’Agata is up against. But he’s resilient, even when his pursuits proliferate and his inquiries lead only to other inquiries. What started as a book about a mountain changes into a book about Las Vegas and suicide and signs and language and death, and it reads like a wonderful and free-flowing improvisation.

We encounter our writer’s pursuit of meaning in his love of lists. And, boy, there are lists. There’s a list of doomsday hunches, from Genesis through Confucius and the Plagues, to Charles Manson and mushroom cloud novelties. There’s a list of the possible effects of a nuclear meltdown, which details the contamination of Vegas all the way down to the steel, the asphalt, hinges, bottles, nuts, and bolts. When referring to a linguist’s list of two hundred words shared across languages, our writer refuses to let the reader take his word for it—D’Agata lists each and every word.

At first this hyperattention to detail—the elevator’s “up” button, the page count of the local phone book—seems to be his way of reclaiming a little sanity, a way to revel in the hard details so lacking in the debate over Yucca, demonstrating D’Agata’s “faith in withheld meanings: the dream that if we linger long enough with anything, the truth of its significance is bound to be revealed.”

But those optimistic lines come early. As About a Mountain unfolds, the lists branch out and we notice how each item stands alone amid all that white space. We notice our writer isn’t cataloguing but attempting to reach a conclusion by accumulation. We begin to see that his task is immense, that he’s seeking answers to the Big Questions, the ones filed under: “The Unknown.” And we are thankful for the effort. But we also sense that at the end of these virtuosic riffs, our writer, despite his efforts, knows he may not know enough.

There’s enough here to fill a prescription for anti-depressants. The death of language. The suicide of a teenage boy. The politics. Vegas. Meanings unrevealed. Or do the meanings reveal themselves? Our writer has a nearly inhuman depth of perception, and readers can take hope from how, in the face of his uncertainty, D’Agata puts his fine improvisational mind to work, where meaning dissolves into nothingness, where low ceilings are protection from God, where suicides occur by the dozen, where cakes are the size of football fields, and where language is as porous and corrosive as that damn mountain.

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