Lopate follows a cranky - though far from self-justifying - short piece about marriage, 'The Limits of Empathy,' with 'The Lake of Suffering,' a punishing account of a prolonged illness that afflicted his infant daughter and, inevitably, her parents. The most memorable pieces in 'To Show and to Tell' fall under the heading 'Studies of Practitioners,' particularly the magisterial appreciation, 'How I Became an Emersonian.' In these essays, Lopate looks at the fine sentence structure of writers in his pantheon, letting us see what a humble, engaged reader he can be, contradicting the impression he willingly makes in a bracing piece such as 'On Not Reading Thomas Bernhard' in 'Portrait Inside My Head.'Īs its title may suggest, 'Portrait Inside My Head' figures in some respects as a follow-up to his 'Portrait of My Body' (1996), whose namesake essay shares with 'Going Long' in the new lot Lopate's sole distasteful tendency: to be a little too confiding.īut 'Portrait Inside My Head' leaves a finer impression of being composed as a body of work. 'To Show and to Tell' includes practical topics whose mastery even Lopate's most teacherly essays exemplify, such as 'The Uses of Contrariety,' 'On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character' and 'How Do you End an Essay?'įor all the sound advice retailed in 'To Show and to Tell,' reading Lopate at his most impassioned offers as much guidance as a reader, or fellow writer, can absorb.

Open, but not undisciplined, as a second collection published concurrently argues: 'To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction.' The little hypnotist turn incidentally has a serious point: that if Lopate cannot make you love reading essays, then no one writing today can. That pivot from profession to shtick and similar twitches of the tail mark Lopate's pleasure in the essay as an open expressive form. But you love essays, you love essays, you are getting very sleepy, you lo-o-ove essays.' I persist because I know the truth, which is, that deep down, you love essays. In introducing his latest book of essays, 'Portrait Inside My Head,' Phillip Lopate explains, 'I persist in putting forth a collection that will include my musings on movies, literature, friendship, sex, urban history, city form, and the nail parings of everyday life, so that the reader can enjoy the fluent play of a single consciousness, a sensibility flowing through disparate subject matters.

(Free Press 292 pages $26) To Show and to Tell The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (Free Press 225 pages $16 paperback) By Phillip Lopate

To show and to tell by phillip lopate