Review by New York Times Review
"WHEN PEOPLE TALK about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it," F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "because they think that it is only style that they are talking about." But uncommon literary style is always integrative, both the mother and the daughter of invention, wrought from a writer's desperation "to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought." Astonishment is a quality central to David Searcy's "Shame and Wonder," a nonfiction collection from a writer best known for two horror-inflected novels, "Ordinary Horror" and "Last Things." What unites these 21 essays, which range from extended, rolling meditations (including one on the semiotics of the cereal box prize) to a lyric fragment on watching the PBS docu-series "Lewis & Clark," is the sense of a wildly querying intelligence suspended in a state of awe. The tension of this predicament - the need to push forward meeting the need to hold still - pervades Searcy's style, which is one of casual virtuosity, expansive focus and ambling centripetal force. Searcy is drawn instinctively to moments, the way parcels of time expand and contract in memory, conjuring from ordinary experience a hidden sense of all that is extraordinary in the world, in being alive. Oriented by an array of such discrete reveries, each of these essays is itself a kind of extended moment, within which Searcy pauses, turns ideas about, attempts to take it all in. Unstructured yet well fortified, Searcy's long, hanging moments take on the contours of a rare, desperately private space. To join him there is to be astonished. "The religious and the modernist impulse seem to spring from the same engulfing moment of self-consciousness and doubt. 'My God, where are we?'" begins "A Futuristic Writing Desk." In this essay, as in others, an observed premise carries Searcy toward a remembered encounter with the world, and often with a work of art - in this case an exhibition of modernist objects in his native Dallas. A small, 1930s Rudolph Schindler desk in particular remains fixed in Searcy's memory, appearing there as "some pure idea of itself, so tensely here-and-now, so free of ornament and history, its cracking and abraded surface ... about to burst, to let it go ahead and slip into the future." Beloved by Searcy as a child of the pop-science-mad 1950s, the future is now something he can imagine only as part of the past; at some point, death became "the future's only critical feature." In sorting through the resulting sense of loss, Searcy returns habitually to questions of meaning, representation and form. In "How to Color the Grass" he recalls as formative, even incendiary, his third-grade art teacher's pushing her students away from their "stick schematic" drawings of Mom, Dad and the little dog and toward a sense of the world around them as specific and therefore imperfectly understood. Some version of this discovery and subsequent struggle repeats across these essays, in which spaces - literal, conceptual, artistic, memorial - open and close themselves to Searcy, both seeking and eluding a comprehensive frame. Late in her life, Virginia Woolf described as pivotal to her creative development a moment from childhood. Regarding a flower outside her home, Woolf felt the shock of apprehension: "That is the whole." The novel served Woolf the way the essay does Searcy: as a mode within which to pursue that shock, to give form to the formless, to make deeply felt and dramatic the place of each well-apprehended moment - each geranium and writing desk - in a unified, timeless whole. Searcy stages his fond, acutely critical argument with all manner of formal boundaries, of course, on pages that are square and uniform: each one a window. MICHELLE ORANGE is the author, most recently, of the essay collection "This Is Running for Your Life."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
This collection of nonfiction pieces by novelist Searcy (Last Things, 2002) is teasingly powerful, though inconsistent. They are often striking in their descriptive passages, especially of the West Texas landscape and, particularly in the oddly titled opening piece The Hudson River School, of people. But characters, action, and story lines are secondary, often absent. Several pieces read like excepts from longer fiction. One set in old Corsicana, involving a peg-legged Jewish tightrope walker carrying (to his death) a stove on his back, is tantalizing. When fleshed out or expanded upon, much here could be compelling book-length fiction; as is, it is alluring but frustrating. The writing is quirky; seemingly out-of-nowhere connections (one peculiarly invoking Jimmy Durante) or science fiction-like excursions pop up unexpectedly. The book is blurbed by John Jeremiah Sullivan, and those who enjoy his equally quirky narrative nonfiction may be drawn to Searcy's similar approach.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hangdog dejection and unlikely epiphanies infuse these offbeat, beguiling essays by novelist Searcy (Last Things). He rattles around the Dallas hinterland (with an overseas excursion to Turkey's St. Nick tourist circuit) and stumbles across oddball stories and subjects: a rancher who uses a recording of his crying baby daughter to lure a troublesome coyote within rifleshot; a giant boulder topped by a scraggly tree covered with pocketknife-carved hearts; the barely-remembered tragedy of a Jewish tightrope walker crushed in a fall in Corsicana, Tex., in 1884. Many pieces recall a sunlit Eisenhower-era boyhood filled with baseball, paper airplanes, woodland excursions with a homemade slingshot, and TV space operas. Others explore Searcy's lifelong fascination with the emotional valence of hard science, which he indulges by repurposing the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, which tested the speed of light, as a symbol of the quest for meaning. Searcy's writing is by sharp turns goofy, wry, and melancholy, tentative at times but always curious and superbly evocative. (An Internet pop-up sex ad "drops down like a rubber spider on a string. As clear and simple and alarming and imperative as schizophrenic voices probably are.") His essays meander along wisps of metaphorical connection, leaping from tooth-flossing to 17th-century housing, from Zuni religious rituals to cereal box prizes, from his mother's still-life painting to medieval Platonism. The result is a funny, haunting journey through mysterious enlightenments. Photos. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
While Searcy's earlier work (Last Things; Ordinary Horror) has been gothic or horror fiction, the 21 essays in this collection are autobiographical stories whose leitmotif is the mystery and elusiveness of "meaning." The entries are dominated by recollections of Searcy's early childhood and adolescence, when the fundamental meaning of things was communicated to him in the carefree happenings of everyday events and objects (e.g., "Mad Science, "A Futuristic Writing Desk," "Cereal Prizes," "Always Shall Have Been"). Since the author's inadequate sensibilities were unable to recognize or comprehend the signs and signals, true meaning passed through him as do neutrinos through matter. Entries such as "Santa in Anatolia," "Nameless," "Love in Space" demonstrate that as adults, our apprehension of meaning is obstructed by conscious thought and our elaborate scientific and philosophical constructs in the pursuit of knowledge. Searcy's idiosyncratic, conversational style is punctuated with asides, interjections, and allusions that suggest that he may be talking to himself. VERDICT While the narrative style may not be for everyone, readers who appreciate it will enjoy this collection.-Lonnie -Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Texas essayist goes looking for meaning in all the right places. The essays in this debut collection by Searcy, who previously published two novels of sci-fi horror (Last Things, 2002, etc.), suggest what might happen if Stephen King somehow morphed into David Foster Wallace. Though there are none of the latter's signature footnotes, the author's allusive and elusive writing seeks connections beneath the surface of appearance and the alternatives to conventional wisdom. His mother was an artist, as is his girlfriend, as is his late friend, and their work provides plenty of perspective on the creative impulse, which also permeates these essays. In the opening "The Hudson River School," a visit to the dental hygienist inspires a visit to her father, a rancher in West Texas, who has been targeting a coyote (or more) that has been attacking his sheep, using a tape of their baby's cries as a lure. "Out here, you probably need to know a lot more clearly what you're doing," writes Searcy. "How to situate yourself. You've got your basics here to deal with after all. Your wind, your emptiness, your animals, your house." Clarity, emptiness, and whatever the basics are remain touchstones throughout these essays, whether the writer is exploring the lunar landscape of Enchanted Rock, touring Turkey in search of Santa Claus, trying to find meaning in his lack of connection with baseball, or rediscovering a piece by his late mother while rummaging through "twenty years of stuff diverted here. Not quite tossed out. You never know." Searcy also spends plenty of time revisiting childhood experiences never quite resolved, snapshots and notebooks that provide a different perspective on the experience he's relating, and occasionally discovering, "How cool and dark and clear it is, right here at the heart of things. How clearly things reveal themselves. Who knew?" Ultimately, meaning and mystery coexist in Searcy's mind, and his offbeat, exciting writing will resonate with readers for whom "you never know" and "who knew?" might be mantras. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.