A Plea for Eros: Essays

The well done cover is certainly alluring, even titiallating, along with the title, but "A Plea for Eros" is not wholly sexual. Siri Hustvedt recalls her Scandinavian background, as well as her life and times in the American Midwest. The stories are autobiographical, well written and Hustvedt does well to put us in her place. I think her examination of sexuality is one that attempts to get in touch with both her feminine and masculine sides, which all of us have. With these stories she gets in touch with herself, is introspective without being sentimental, and sometimes is very pointed and direct. Anyone reaching a point in life where they question themselves, or wonder who/what they are should check this out.

Siri Hustvedt is one fine writer. Her skills go beyond the technical expertise of honing in on a thought, relishing it, dissecting it, relating it, and offering it back to the reader. Here is a writer whose depth of knowledge about literature is vast and whose spectrum of sensibilities about living and the hurdles involved is uniquely her own. A PLEA FOR EROS is a collection of twelve essays written over the course of time from 1995 to 2004 - a bit of information that is more important than the tidbit suggests... Hustvedt reminisces about her childhood in Minnesota, her brief juncture with being a movie extra in an adaptation of Henry James' 'Washington Square' that centers on the topic of corsets (!), the personal effect of 911 on her life and beliefs, her perceptions of the differences between the sexes, and the meaning of place. She also provides some very erudite and fascinating studies of Henry James' 'The Bostonians', Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other luminaries of literature, finding her attention focused not solely on the literary merits of these writers, but also on topics that bounce off her springboard of creative thinking initiated by the subjects. For this reader Hustvedt is at her best when she explores the waters of emotion and eroticism not only in literature but also in the way our society has come to interact. 'We live in an age of religious sects and mad militias, of gurus scattered about the country form California to New York, an age of channeling, colonics, crystals, and raw food crazes.' From this stance Hustvedt takes us places to prove that we are where we come from, that our exuberance for life comes at a price yet not one too dear to make. She is enlightened, entertaining, controversial, and a spinner of pages of elegant writing that makes time spent between these two covers very special. Finding the thread that unites these twelve fascinating essays is the joy she offers. Grady Harp, February 06

What do essays on corsets, parenting, post-September 11th New York, an obscure character actor, and Charles Dickens all have in common? Not much really, but these disparate topics are brought together in A PLEA FOR EROS, previously published essays by Siri Hustvedt. Hustvedt is best known as a novelist and is the author of WHAT I LOVED and THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILY DAHL. Hustvedt's essays are very writerly, usually exploring issues of identity or literary concepts. Some are personal while others are more academic in nature, but all are thoughtful and thought-provoking. Hustvedt begins with a piece entitled "Yonder," which is one of the more successful and readable essays in the book. She examines the idea of place and memory and the shaping of family, individual and community identity. This is very much a story about her Norwegian family and how this background has shaped who she is. Readers are introduced to her relatives, in this country and in Norway, to her small hometown in Minnesota, and to the New York she chose as home as an adult. Hustvedt begins by discussing the idea of "here and there," and though she sometimes seems to move far from this theme in the essays, she always does wind her way back to this concept and how "here" and "there" play in our imaginations. Several of the essays are about novels and authors and, more broadly, literary themes explored by particular authors. Here, readers unfamiliar with the texts or less than interested in literary criticism may be bored, uninterested, or left in the proverbial dust as Hustvedt dissects THE GREAT GATSBY and other works. "The Bostonians: Personal and Interpersonal Words" is an interesting look at a Henry James story, and "Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment" explores the idea of death and the dead body in the work of Dickens. These literary essays are, of course, not personal in the way the others in the collection are, but Hustvedt's deep appreciation of these authors and their works is personal in its way. The essay on Dickens is the longest and by far the best of the three literary-themed pieces. While Hustvedt is focusing on OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, she illuminates themes found in much of Dickens's work such as the absent or abusive father figure, madness, and self-identity (the "I"). Even readers unfamiliar with Dickens's work may be interested in her analysis. Although there is seemingly little unification in this collection, Hustvedt brings her topics together by making them personal to her and always coming around to the idea of identity or self. She relies heavily on psychology in her examinations. A PLEA FOR EROS is a mostly interesting and readable collection, but it has limited appeal. It can be dense and wordy, and at times is an intellectual exercise as opposed to entertainment. Hustvedt's style is elegant, however, and her range of knowledge impressive. Recommended for readers interested in essays closer to those of Susan Sontag than Sarah Vowell. --- Reviewed by

Siri Hustvedt is usually pretty good. She wrote a great novel in which she accidentally uncovered one of the great true crime mysteries of human times, the case Hollywood enshrined as "Party Monster," accidentally finding out that the real culprit was roosting right within her own family, a situation which, hitting so close to home, provoked her to the cutting edge of fiction, sharpening her instruments all around. Ever since that book, she has been a contender in the contest for who is the greatest American novelist. Last year we saw the publication of a book of her essays about painting. I think even her strongest supporters would agree that art criticism is not really her forte. But as an occasional essayist, she could write for the New Yorker, and on occasion her writing is a little bit like that of the late Edmund Wilson, for she has a wide mind and the capacity to speak it no matter what the circumstances. Among the collected essays of A PLEA FOR EROS she has placed an appealing little story about being an extra in a film with Jennifer Jason Leigh and having to wear a corset for an extended period of time; this enables her to sort of "get into" the feeling of what it might have been like to be an American woman of the 1870 period. Her best essays are founded in this combination of the personal, the physical, and something extra that might be called, the metaphysical. However a few of the pieces here are just light fluff, which is a shame because a book like this is only as strong as the weakest of its pieces which in this case, is pretty weak. The best of the bunch is her analysis of movie sissy Franklin Pangborn and trying to figure out why this ridiculous movie character, the "quintessential tight-ass," as she calls him, appeals to her so. It's the kind of thing Sontag might have been proud to call her own. "In my domestic life," she writes, "I fight blur, ambiguity, cyclones, and decay (if not disease). It is a classically feminine position, which is not to say that there aren't scores of men who find themselves in it. I don't know if Pangborn is ever seen actually cleaning in a film, but it is not necessary to see him at it. His character is spotless and obsessive, a figure of perfect order." Quirky and spot-on, Hustvedt's musings strike a chord among anyone who has ever seen their own worst failings animated on the screen, reversing Lacan's mirror image with a hilarious contempt for the "nitwits" that populate every stage of our lives.

This is honestly one of the most fascinating works I have read this year, Hustvedt's essays a fluid mix of personal recollections, comments on literature and a view of the writing life. The author's love of language is evident, as is her engagement with the world, all imbued with a passion that fills each thoughtful memoir and cultural/literary criticism: "My private geography, like most people's, excludes huge portions of the world." She views history with a compassionate eye, mining the past for the symbols and literary gems, from Henry James to Charles Dickens to F. Scott Fitzgerald, hinting that the true Eros lies in the fertile imagination, in a capacity for difference, ambiguity, tolerance and curiosity. The collection begins with "Yonder", an autobiographical essay of the "miraculous flexibility of language" and the nature of the places we collect as memory, infused with a personal magic. The immigrant experience of the author's background exists somewhere between here and there, somewhere yonder that is never reached, much like the journey that is savored, rather than the destination. The three places that loom in the author's life are Northfield, Minnesota, New York and the Norway of her grandparents. Even here, the author digresses into the subtle terrain of language, tying elements of the personal with the reading experience, "the world of reading is a kind of yonder world." In "A Plea for Eros", the author makes a case that familiarity and the humdrum of everyday life are the enemies of Eros, that eroticism thrives on borders and distance, a theme supported in the following essays, "Gatsby's Glasses", "Eight Days in a Corset", "Being a Man" and "Leaving Your Mother" and more. This spectacular collection includes previously unpublished work, "Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment" and two others that have not been published in the United States, "9/11, or One Year Later" and "Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self". Each page is filled with thoughtful observations, all linked to literature, language and the human experience. Each essay contains revelations, those obscure connections between reality and the world of the imagination: Creating fiction is making a place for the reader in the text, "the words accelerate the book, they don't bog it down in pointless novelistic gab" and "writing fiction is remembering what never happened" (Yonder); American feminism has perforce ignored erotic truth, a willful blindness, revealing that "seduction is inevitably a theater of barriers" (A Plea for Eros); and "The true ground of all fiction is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination" (Gatsby's Glasses). A Plea for Eros is not only a delightful exploration of ideas but a personally rewarding experience. Hustvedt's insights are revelatory and provocative, meditations on the written word, personal experience and intellectual curiosity that are nothing less than extraordinary. In prose so rich that it bears a kind of enchantm