With her first three books—Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife; and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex —Mary Roach carved a name out for herself as a long-form journalist with a rare combination of macabre curiosity and formidable intellect, plus the chops of a stand-up comic. In her new book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, she puts that combo to good use once again as she takes on the everyday practicalities of space travel. Her investigations take her from Japan to Russia to hidden corners of NASA as she considers our fascination with space, the history behind it, and tackles questions including “Can you get high from zero gravity?” to “How does B.O. work in space?”

Rumpus Rockstar Mike Scalise recently spoke with Mary Roach about the journalistic advantages of being the “boob” in any given situation, the rigors of interviewing aerospace administrators, and why that process nearly caused her to abandon this book entirely. It’s just the latest example of that refreshing literary twofer we like to call The Rumpus Original Combo.

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The Rumpus Interview with Mary Roach

The Rumpus: Your battle for access becomes the surprise narrative of Packing for Mars—on one level we’re looking behind the scenes at space travel, then on another looking also at Mary Roach trying to talk to these aerospace guys.

Mary Roach: I always approach books with kind of this kind of naïve optimism of “everyone will want to get involved! Its fun! Its fun to hang around with me and let me come and see what you’re doing and let me write down everything that you’re saying!” Well, they’re a government agency, they come from a background of secrecy. They are just raised in this atmosphere of paranoia and cautiousness, which doesn’t fit with me.

So I’m like, “Well what do you mean I can’t go to the cadaver crash test? Why not?” “Well,” they’d say, “we’re just really uncomfortable with this.” Tell me what you’re uncomfortable about? “You know, we’ve had some bad press. Online. There were some people online.” For God’s sake!

It took—I can’t even tell you how many emails, phone calls, just to get approval. They’d say, “Well, you know, Mary. It’s okay with us in public affairs. But headquarters says no.” Then they’d give me a name, and I’d try to get that person, who’d go: “Oh, I don’t care.” Then I’d go back to public affairs and they’d say “Oh, did we say him? Actually, we meant the people at Ohio State. They don’t want you to do it.”

Rumpus: Have there ever been situations where your reputation has worked against you, where people have been less receptive to your previous work?

Roach: I’m sure… I’m sure that explains the many, many times where I don’t get a reply from someone. But it’s gotten easier and easier, which I didn’t necessarily expect. John Bolte, the guy who ran the cadaver crash test lab at the Transportation Research Center Ohio—I sent him the chapter, and his initial reaction was, “I better get my CV together, because I’m going to be fired soon.” But then he said, “Then I got up in the morning and I re-read the chapter with my Mary Roach glasses on, and I said, ‘This is great!’”

Anybody that you portray in a few paragraphs is a caricature. People are really taking a leap of faith when they agree to be profiled in a book—not just my book, but any book. Because you’re just taking a little snippet of who they are, what they do. They can’t really control it. Some people just fixate on it.

Rumpus: The persona that you take on in your writing is always so generous…

Roach: I try to portray myself as the boob, because typically I am. I’m in any given situation the boob. I don’t understand what my subjects are saying. I make mistakes. I knock things over. There are endless ways in which I am the idiot in the room. In my work I don’t exactly exaggerate that, but I certainly make no attempt to hide that fact. Because I don’t want it to seem like I’m disrespectful of people’s work.

Rumpus: Or “out to get them.”

Roach: Right. People are just tremendously good sports. They really are. There’s a playfulness to what I do that people in the world of science aren’t used to, because science communications and journals are very, very serious. Academics are pretty cutthroat, and people are very competitive. So they’re not always used to their information being portrayed in such a casual, simple way.

Rumpus: Spook originated from your reaction to the catechism classes you took while you were younger, and in Stiff there’s a really affecting passage about your mother’s passing that serves as the personal seed. But with Packing for Mars, it seemed to be less rooted in something deeply personal, yet you still managed to maintain the same level of intimacy. Was that difficult this time around?

Roach: Well, no. The scenes that you’re referring to in Stiff and Spook, because they came at the front of the book they felt like a jumping off point, like they motivated a personal quest. But in my mind, when I was working on the books, they didn’t really play such a big role. I just get so caught up in the researchers and the science and the strangeness and surreal-ness of some of these worlds that it really is so much more about them than me.

For all my books, I feel like the personal side of it is so minor for me. I’ve always been a bit of a closet space geek. I did a story years ago for Discover where I went to Johnson Space Center with a neutral buoyancy tank where they train the astronauts. I was in hog heaven. It was just incredible. To me NASA is like the Magic Kingdom: “Oooooh! Look at this stuff! Look! There’s an astronaut!” So I guess that I’ve had an interest dating from that story, but it didn’t seem like anything worth mentioning. I wasn’t ever a Star Trek fan or science fiction fan, so it really would have felt contrived to put it in.

Rumpus: It worked differently. There’s a level of friendliness and intimacy with which you present the information that I really responded to throughout.

Roach: I’m glad to hear that. The book felt different from all the others in a way because it is really different material. Bonk I had this incredible richness of scientific studies. It was a constant combination of incredible respect for these researchers who did this, particularly in the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s. And also, just like, “Oh, my God, you did what?” So I’m glad to hear that happened in the new book, because half way through I was ready to quit.

Rumpus: Really? Why?

Roach: It was around the time I was trying to get access to the cadaver crash test, and I’d been turned down for a number of things. It was the sense that I couldn’t get the kind of material that my readers love. Japan had fallen through. I didn’t know how I was going to set up Moscow. I thought, “Maybe I’ll go to China.” Well, forget it. The Chinese space agency—you just can’t get anywhere there. I was trying to get access to the people in the Mars 500 study, and I ended up talking to people from a past test, the Sphinx test, which was much more interesting anyway. There were so many steps along the way where I had to rethink major chunks of the book. After a while, you just feel like, “Okay, I quit. I give up.”

Rumpus: What was the moment that kept you going?

Roach: I think when the Japanese public affairs woman wrote and said, “Good news, you’re welcome to come here that week.” It was the same week I heard from John Bolte saying, “You know what? Just come here. We’ll deal with it when you get here.” Plus, you have a deadline. You’ve done a year’s worth of work, and the thought of giving up is as stressful as the thought of going forward.

Rumpus: What’s interesting to me is the common undercurrent in the topics that you choose: the war between the ambitions of the soul and the limits of the body that houses it. In Packing for Mars, there are the chapters that cover the dangers of a space vomit, but there is also that wonderful chapter about space euphoria, too.

Roach: In the early days of space travel—it’s hard for us to understand it now. But the level of anxiety and kind of neophobia—it’s new. We don’t know what’s up there. What’s going to happen? We’re going to put these human beings up in this environment about which we know nothing. Gravity’s a pretty serious issue. So what happens if you take that away? What will happen? The extent of the hand-wringing that went on, and the concern, it seems to us now—we’ve just completely taken for granted.

That era of the early ‘60s was to me just so fascinating. We wanna go up there. We wanna go to the moon, to Mars. But we are just these little sacks of flesh and muscle and blood and nervous impulses. We’re little frail things. What the heck will happen to us? Just the notion of this giant rocket with this little tiny monkey strapped to it, and us going, “Oh, I hope you’re okay!”

Rumpus: Speaking of space monkeys, there was the one chapter where you felt compelled to clear the name of Enos a.k.a. “The Penis,” the astro-chimp from the 1960’s with the reputation for nonstop masturbating.

Roach: You can’t believe how much time I wasted!

Rumpus: I thought it was one of the most heartfelt passages in the book! What drove you to say, “I have to set the record straight here”?

Enos

Roach: I was so desirous of finding that footage. There’s footage you can see on YouTube of Ham [Enos’ astro-chimp co-pilot] in his flight container making little monkey faces. And I thought, “Well, that must exist for Enos.” And if this is true, then it’s the first space porn, you know? I’ve got to see this… Then, after calling his handlers and saying what’s this about “Enos the Penis”? They told me, “Mary, all monkeys masturbate. He didn’t do any more than the others.” And I thought, “My God! Poor Enos! He got half the glory Ham did. He’s just this running joke in space books.” I felt bad for Enos. But for me it’s just one of those things where, once you dive in, you have to follow it all the way through.

Rumpus: It was one of a few instances in the book where you encountered some exaggerated coverage of space flight.

Roach: I think it just drove home the point that many nonfiction books—especially books with no sources at all—are not fact-checked. It’s not like a story in The New Yorker. Outside excerpted a chapter of the book, and we were fine-tuning and hairsplitting the whole time. There’s none of that with books. We tend to think, if it’s in print, it’s true. That’s why I try not to use other people’s books as sources. But sometimes you don’t really have a choice.

[With Enos,] it was kind of amazing to see the progression. Each writer had chosen part of the story and exaggerated it. It kind of morphed through the years and through the different books. I think these days books are more carefully sourced. Particularly a non-fiction history of the space program.

For this book I actually had a formal technical reviewer. He was a space historian and a former NASA employee and aerospace “dude.” He reviews space books on Amazon. I actually found him because he’d done a very, very careful criticism of a book that came out last year. So I contacted him and asked him if I could pay him to go over my book. The scope of this book—there’s historical elements, there’s aerospace. And then there’s elements of rocket trajectory. As a newcomer and interloper there were just so many ways for me to mess up.

Rumpus: I always admire writers who are able to go the bodily function route in a classy manner—which you do in Packing for Mars. Repeatedly.

Roach: Oh, then I’m your gal! Obviously, that is the most frequently asked question if you talk to astronauts or cosmonauts: How do you go to the bathroom? For some reason people are endlessly fascinated with that.

The reason I covered that was because it was this wonderful and kind of easily graspable demonstration of how the lack of gravity changes everything. We don’t really think about the fact that you sit on a toilet, and it’s gravity that pulls waste away from you. As the mass increases, so does the downward pull, and it breaks away and goes into the toilet. Well, you don’t have that in space. Now what do you do?

And to me, it just drove home this point of how everything is different in space. Everything has to be re-learned. It wasn’t just me pandering to the lowest common denominator, which of course you can accuse me of and be absolutely right. I thought it was interesting in its own right in addition to the tee-hee, bodily function humor side of it. It was just a genuinely fascinating conundrum. There’s no quicker way to destroy morale on a space flight than to have a toilet conk out, which happened just recently on the International Space Station. Both toilets, actually. So for this book I thought it was an important and entertaining story to tell.

Read the Rumpus Review of Packing for Mars.

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Midway though her fourth book—the hilarious and enlightening Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void—journalist Mary Roach slams the brakes on what’s been, to that point, an evenhanded recap of NASA’s liberal, often inhumane use of primates as test animals for space exploration in the 1950s and ‘60s. Her goal: To defend the honor of a chimp named Enos, who—despite being one of the founding fathers of astro-chimps (and of American space exploration itself)—is known to history simply as “Enos the Penis.” Enos earned the nickname through either his propensity to be a “dick” to his handlers, or his unstoppable masturbation marathons, which were allegedly so frequent that NASA was forced to catheterize him, while in orbit, to curtail the beating.

Something in this story smells fishy to Roach, so she embarks on a one-woman mission to clear Enos’s name, sifting though archives of the “X-Rated Enos footage,” contacting former handlers and debunking shoddy journalism to reveal the truth behind the chimp’s mythos—a truth that provides a more rewarding window into the realities of space travel than one might expect. As in her three previous books— Bonk, which explored human sexuality; Spook, which took on the supernatural; and Stiff, which traced the various predicaments of human cadavers—this marriage of the trivial and the mind-bending, the crude and the majestic, is what drives Packing for Mars, a lighthearted, ambitious look at the people who launch themselves into the cosmos and the rigorous, earthbound training they endure to get there.

Mary Roach

The topic is a fertile one for a writer like Roach, who—like Susan Orlean, Tony Horwitz, Sarah Vowell, or Michael Paterniti—approaches her subjects from a place of charming, unabashed wonder. This sensibility nicely offsets the stuffy tenor that space programs—or, say, sex research programs—have lugged around for years. Whether she’s touring the sullen hallways of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (where astronauts train for “patience and accuracy under pressure” by—no joke—folding origami), or considering the problems inherent in a zero-gravity up-chuck, Roach is able to maintain the persona of a geeky friend with the gift of gutter humor; her fascination with research and minutiae is so genuine and infectious that a reader can’t help but adopt her bottomless curiosity. “I should really be down on the floor with my team, taking notes on how its going,” she writes about being suspended, weightless, during a parabolic flight on a C-9 jet. “I can’t do this, however, because my notebook is floating in front of my face with all the pages fanned out, and I need to stare at it for a while.”

This tactic certainly endears her to even the most general reader, but to NASA officials? Not so much. An unfortunate sub-plot emerges in Packing for Mars, in which the protective agents of governmentally funded programs close the doors on Roach’s attempts to learn more about their work. Emails go unanswered, calls unreturned, and Roach has to set off for Japan and Russia to find programs she can actually observe. While the comparisons between the astronauts of various countries, all of whom seem to reinforce their own stereotypes (Americans: look-you-in-the-eye serious; Japanese: meditative; Russians: drunken, inappropriate), are entertaining, one can’t help but wonder what Roach might have learned had the U.S. program been more cooperative.

Still, Roach makes it clear that, to an extent, the secretive nature of space-travel administrators is a prerequisite for even the most minor successes in the cosmos. In perhaps the most unexpectedly revelatory chapter in the book, Roach sets out to answer the question How do you shit in space? and finds herself in astronaut potty training, where promising space cadets are coached by “waste water engineers”—via closed-circuit camera mounted in a replica space toilet—to deposit “contributions” into an opening spanning just four inches in diameter. And yes, Roach definitely milks the opportunity for laughs—in one hilarious passage she imagines herself in mid-squat—but she also uses the experience to discuss the importance of gravity in even the most simple, biological reflex, and the life-or-death consequences of poorly contained waste in mid-orbit.

Ultimately, it’s Roach’s endless fascination with these odd pairings—the lovely ways in which the ambitions of the soul clash with the limits of the body—that make Packing for Mars such a pleasing read. For every passage about the womb-like transcendence of zero-G flotation, or the otherworldly splendors of what astronauts call “space euphoria,” there is a flight transcript featuring astronauts chasing free-floating turds, or in-depth research on the effects of body odor in the flight cabin—proving that when you tackle a subject as vast and wondrous as the Final Frontier, sometimes its best to start with the brief, terrestrial hijinks of a masturbating chimp.

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Read Mike Scalise’s interview with Mary Roach—the other half of the Rumpus Original Combo.

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Following her father’s death, novelist Siri Hustvedt split into two women: one who fell into sharp, inexplicable body tremors at unexpected moments, and another woman, even more tortured, who became fixated on the existence of the first. It’s that second woman, the tortured one, who narrates Hustvedt’s fascinating memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, a clinical yet visceral look into not just how our body responds to loss, but the more complicated ways in which our minds cope with the uncertainty of undiagnosable illness.

The setup is this: During a speech honoring the memory of her father two years after his funeral, Hustvedt’s body convulsed with a force so raw and enveloping that her relatives in the audience—who rushed the podium to hold her still—felt as though “they were looking at an electrocution.” Yet when it becomes clear that the spell is more than an isolated incident (she has episodes at public engagements, around the house, at a Paris art gallery), Hustvedt doesn’t spend time reconstructing the drama-ridden father/daughter narrative that may have led to the convulsions. Though doctors couldn’t diagnose the shakes, it was obvious that her father’s death triggered them—so Hustvedt chooses to focus on the nuts and bolts of her and similar illnesses, the psychoses fueling the breakdowns, not the personalities behind them. The Shaking Woman is thus less a traditional memoir than a sprawling, ruthlessly researched exploration into memory and the curious ways in which trauma can manifest through physical illness. Think less Mary Karr, more Oliver Sacks.

Siri Hustvedt

It’s a tactic that yields some of the book’s most compelling passages. Hustvedt is driven to examine the Shaking Woman through “every angle,” reads “obsessively” about the history of hysteria, consults with specialists about treatments such as Narrative Medicine (which maps the whole of neurological disorders with storytelling), and the power of cloaked trauma to render the body independent of the mind’s intentions. She profiles amnesiacs who, by simply free-writing to the prompt “I remember,” are able to uncover hidden pockets of memories that spoken attempts can’t. She examines victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, grieving widows who lose control of halves of their bodies, and the plight of a man who, following a cerebral hemorrhage, grows so intensely hateful of his twitchy left hand that he vows to “smash this hand into a million pieces and post the pieces to the surgeon, in envelopes, one by one.”

While Hustvedt’s musings on the mind/body war sometimes fall into the stoned grad-schooler category (“Who are we, anyway?”), she’s largely able to anchor these passages with thoughtful reflections about the nature of her own shakes that attempt to locate, through all the neurological hiccups, where—if anywhere—control resides. But it’s the failure of her consultations with doctors, and her own forays into medical history, to give a name to her own mind/body betrayal that opens The Shaking Woman up to something beyond a standard illness memoir. Hustvedt is left with little more than her hunger for more research, her desire to, as Joan Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking—with which The Shaking Woman shares some core DNA—“read, learn, work it up, go to the literature,” for control.

Yet unlike Didion, Hustvedt includes very few bona fide “scenes” to dramatically purge the paragraphs of information she reels out. Instead there are only her relentless investigations into conditions and theories with seemingly no medical authority to guide her—Asperger’s Syndrome, out-of-body experiences, and the bizarre Stendhal syndrome, in which people feel, deeply, whatever pain they witness. She tries them all on, hoping one might fit the Shaking Woman, hoping that if she can’t extinguish the condition she might at least categorize it, even when the rain of data seems to hold her hostage. “I know it wasn’t psychogenic,” she writes after experiencing a seizure while hiking. “Can it be related to my peripheral neuropathy? Can that turn into the shakes?”

Rather than lean on the answers—there are few—The Shaking Woman is driven by the continuing questions; the research-driven passages of self-diagnosis that make up the second half of the book combine to form a unique and moving pathos that traditional drama can’t access. In the process, Hustvedt’s chronicle offers a rich, beleaguered account of how illness can smother the identity of the person who suffers from it.

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I read a lot of memoirs. And when I do I avoid reading flap copy, for fear that the crisp promo-speak will taint my reading, or distort my expectations. I broke that rule for Gonville, writer/actor Peter Birkenhead’s memoir of his childhood in the shadow of an abusive, gun-obsessed father who harbored an unhealthy man-crush on 19th Century British Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. Two chapters into Birkenhead’s memoir—after a post-Chappaquiddick Ted Kennedy cameo is followed by a cold, abrupt scene of young Birkenhead munching idly on an apple as his father beats his brother limp for touching one of his many, many guns—I closed the book and thought, “Why does this book feel so familiar?”

Then I read the flap copy, which noted that the Gonville combines “the terror and wit of Running with Scissors, the poignancy and sense of place of The Tender Bar, with the sparkling prose of Oh the Glory of It All.” And it hit me: The chapter I’d just read should have translated to bizarre, hilarious, and severe storytelling. A towering father with an equal capacity for charisma, vulnerability, and rage? Yes. A wry sense of humor in the face of danger? Yep. Yet somehow those elements are neutered by the flap copy—not because the books by Augusten Burroughs, J. R. Moehringer, and Sean Wilsey are Gonville’s driving inspiration, but because the book seems built from their scraps.

Which isn’t to say that Gonville is a “bad” memoir—it’s not. The narrative tells three stories that technically hit every note they need to: Birkenhead’s journey from young, summer-stock stagehand to struggling New York actor; his mother’s jagged ascension from oppressed, battered housewife to accomplished Broadway musician; and most prominently, his father’s degeneration from well respected history professor to lonely, erratic victim of his own paranoia and malice. Aside from a few lazy gusts of hyperbole (“Grandma smiled like she could melt Siberia”), Birkenhead’s prose largely carries a charming voice and a swift momentum, and he doesn’t shy away from human drama.

Peter Birkenhead

But tonally, Gonville is a shapeshifter, absorbing the characteristics and mannerisms of other recent memoirs that have covered similar territory more naturally. The chapter with Ted Kennedy and the brutal beating re-creates the same odd marriage of pathos and pop-culture absurdity that Wilsey made sing so well in Oh the Glory of It All; yet Birkenhead’s telling lacks Wilsey’s fearless ability to explore his own cursed role in that absurdity. The depictions of Birkenhead’s father that lead off the book—clad in bikini briefs in a room stocked with weaponry, reenacting scenes from the 1964 film Zulu, starring Michael Caine as Lt. Gonville—don’t recall Burroughs’ surreal passages about his mother in Running with Scissors as much as they attempt to re-inhabit them. Brikenhead’s interludes of teen mischief, girlfriends, and New York Mets fandom channel the cinematic, wistful tone Moehringer leaned on in The Tender Bar, and so on.

Given that Birkenhead was, until a few years ago, an actor—someone who professionally inhabits other characters, lives other narratives—this tonal mash-up almost makes sense. But it makes for a disjointed and sometimes hollow reading experience, and readers are left waiting for the real Peter Birkenhead to truly emerge.

Which, on rare occasions, he does happen. There are sublime, pleasurable moments in Gonville that that belong only to Birkenhead, that can’t be funneled through anyone else’s lens. His sweet-and-sour relationship to a young, boozy Elaine Stritch , for instance, lives in the gray areas between guilt, shame, and friendship. And Birkenhead’s most consistent father/son scenes feature him reluctantly gripping his father’s ankles as the man plows through mortifying bouts of naked sit-ups, flashes of bizarre levity that still carry an unchecked charge of predatory danger.

But ultimately the book’s major plot twists fall victim to the predictable beats of the modern memoir factory: Here is the moment of stolen innocence. Here is where the protagonist sees someone differently than he once had. Here, the book’s major, shocking secret will be revealed… While that reliability can sometimes be comforting, Gonville’s revelations, when they come, are so telegraphed they provide little room for genuine, transformative insight, particularly in the closing passages of the book, where they’re needed most.

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Kurt Caswell’s award-winning essays channel Phillip Lopate and David Foster Wallace, while exploring the plight of a “mountain man” stuck in a paved-over world.

Kurt Caswell wants you to take a walk with him. His uneven but ultimately charming debut essay collection, An Inside Passage—winner of this year’s River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize—features personal accounts of no fewer than fifteen walks through more than a dozen locales around the globe. And these aren’t leisurely strolls—these are essayist walks: treks of deep purpose through formidable terrain—the recesses of the Ganges, the summits of Hokkaido, Japan—full of slow-moving, enthralling lyrical gasps from a writer who believes, with undying conviction, that walking remains “a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills.”

There’s a sharp current of ambition in each of Caswell’s journeys, but it’s his tirelessly hopeful sensibility that drives this collection. The fuel of each quest remains constant—the use of motion and nature as a salve—but it’s often Caswell’s unexpected destinations, both physical and spiritual (marriage, broken friendships, loss, divorce), that prove to be the source of his ambivalence: Can the world and its ills still accommodate someone who believes that “immortality is possible simply by going on a journey”?

For those accustomed to Ander Monson’s self-referential bells and whistles, or the hardened city wit of Vivian Gornick, Kurt Caswell is not your man. The earlier essays in An Inside Passage range from sprawling, solitary meditations on “accepting the world, its successes and failures, creations and destructions, its living and dying” (“Five Country Walks”) to short admirations of the blue heron’s single-mindedness (“A Matter for Heron”). In “Fawn,” Caswell takes a grizzly account of hitting a deer with a pickup and elevates it to a suspense-filled, lyric waltz with nature’s gray areas:

The fawn was breathing fast and warm on my arm, its eyes closed, unconscious. I ran my hands down the length of its legs, across its back, palpating the muscles and bones. Nothing broken, I thought. I found abrasions. Bloody scrapes from the friction with the road. One on the right hind leg. Another small red strawberry on its left side. Across its head, to my shock, most of the hair was torn away. It was scalped and skinned, pockets of pain, and it bled from the soft petals of its ears.

Kurt Caswell

However, Caswell’s aesthetic can, at times, seem hermetically sealed, close to cutting the reader out of the equation. “A Horse Builds a Woman in a Storm (A Dream),” for instance, is exactly that: an insulated prose poem that reads like little more than a cut-and-paste from Caswell’s dream journal. And “Letter to a Young Girl at Summer’s End,” in which Caswell addresses a former student who died in a car accident, seems more a repository for his resentment of the deceased’s family than a keen attempt to map grief’s unwelcome ripple. “Your mother came into the church, supported by one of the pall-bearers and quivering in her bottom lip,” he writes. “I’m sorry, but that was an act.”

When Caswell’s nature-gaze broadens to include the far murkier prospect of human drama, the writing grows sharp, effacing, and endearingly vulnerable. An Inside Passage becomes, for a time, an account of the slow dissolution of his marriage—and it’s here that he reveals himself as a man tragically out of place in the realms of the social. In essays like “The Best Thing about Marriage Is Divorce” and the brilliant “Banaue Tercet”—in which Caswell, his despondent wife, and a third party with romantic ties to both, spend an uncomfortably close New Year’s Eve hiking in the Philippines, waiting for the Y2K punchline to reveal itself—Caswell pits his preference for solitude against the odd terrain of coupling. After his wife confronts him about her desire for children during a trek in Batad, Caswell offers: “She doesn’t really desire me, so it seems, but my seed… Wasn’t the marriage supposed to be about wanting each other, not a third person who hadn’t been created? Or did I have it all wrong?”

Unlike the blue heron or the depths of the Ganges, people remain unsolvable puzzles to Caswell, and he loosens the still, luxurious flow of his language when he considers them. The result is an appeal both to readers who share his affinity for exotic locales and to those who cherish the everyday ironies of the human predicament. The rhythms in his later essays are playful and choppy, the word choice refreshingly crass. (He describes a tour guide’s legs as “fuckin’ huge,” in the illuminating and hilarious “Wild Man at Iouzan,” and comments in another piece that a student’s rationale “sounded like doo doo to me.”)

In the book’s true gem, “The Rescue,” Caswell goes in search of a student gone AWOL in the California woodlands following a body mod gone wrong. The author takes the opportunity to deliver a humorous and forgiving consideration of not just the history, but perhaps the true draw, of the storied Prince Albert, that channels the wit and sprit of David Foster Wallace.

The final essays—“vision quests” in Death Valley, treks to retrace the steps of his elders in Alaska—attempt with a learned, elegant wisdom to justify his plight as a “mountain man” stuck in a paved-over world; but there’s something to be said for the power of directness. As with Wallace and Phillip Lopate, Caswell knows when to drop the poetry and cut to the chase, such as the moment in “The Rescue” when he barks out his principals with curmudgeonly delight: “We’re all little more than a single hair on the universe’s great ass!” he wants to say to his students, but decides instead to tell the reader.

“Forget about your little drama and go live your life!” he exclaims—but by the end of An Inside Passage, we’re happy to have settled for his.

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