Review by New York Times Review
"A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING at women" is a collection of essays that, taken as a whole, is meant to increase the common reader's understanding of and interest in the rich brew of human endeavor to be found in science and the humanities when we try to see the accomplishments of the one through the lens of the other. In its introduction, Siri Hustvedt reminds us of the famous culture war brought on in 1959 by the English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, who warned that the gulf between those who understood either science or literature but not both would prove deadly to the future of liberal democracy. Today, Hustvedt observes, that threat seems more potent than ever, what with those who love the new technology indiscriminately, those who hate it indiscriminately, and very few in either camp who have a large grasp of its potential effect on us half a century from now. Hustvedt speaks here both as a writer of fiction (she's got six novels under her belt) and as a serious autodidact who has spent the last decade reading and writing about neurobiology in hopes that she herself might become that marvelously integrated citizen Snow was calling for: a person who has developed a mind-set that moves with ease between understanding derived from the emotional imagination as well as the analytic intellect. The book we have in hand, however, made me wonder whether anyone can develop a sensibility so flexible it can address both sorts of experience with equal intimacy. "A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women" is divided into three parts. The first part includes essays on sexism, the arts, pornography in our time, and Hustvedt's own psychoanalysis; the third, essays on suicide, psychological blindness, philosophy and the brain, and Kierkegaard. These essays are often richly explored - especially the ones based in philosophical thought - and, when art is the subject, touchingly personal. Reflecting on the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Hustvedt asserts that the spiritual exchange between herself and the artist has been so intense that Bourgeois "is now part of my bodily self in memory, both conscious and unconscious" and "in turn has mutated into the forms of my own work, part of the strange transference that takes place between artists." The middle section is a 200-page presentation of the various kinds of neurobiological work now being done on the age-old mind-body problem. It is this part of the book - the one that concentrates on the astonishing efforts being made to understand the mind as distinct from the brain - that most seriously commanded my attention. What clearly intrigues Hustvedt, the inspired student of science, is the exciting uncertainty that underpins this work. Here, she "trumpets doubt and ambiguity, not because we are incapable of knowing things," but because "doubt is fertile." In service to this thesis Hustvedt gives us an encyclopedic tour of the investigative research being done by the neurobiologists who spend their lives addressing subjects that fit under such headings as "Brains: Hard or Soft?"; "Nature/ Nurture: Minds and Pop Culture" ; "Heritability and Twin Tales" ; "Machines, Emotions and Bodies." The resultant essay reads like the work of a talented teacher who has the drive and the ability to organize and present - in an exceptionally clear, clean, even limpid voice - a monumental amount of abstract information. It's hard to overstate the pleasure and the comfort that such demystification provides the scientifically uninitiated; it does indeed make the world feel larger, more expansive, more alive to the touch. I have only one caveat: In awe, no doubt, of the formidable task she has set herself, Hustvedt is compelled to let us know how extensively she has studied by invoking the names of almost everyone she has ever read, thereby making the essay often seem, unnecessarily, as though it has been written by someone who swallowed a library whole in order to lay claim to authority. While Hustvedt is avowedly devoted to making artists and scientists value each other's way of taking in experience, in this collection science and the scientific persuasion ultimately take pride of place. I thought it a shame that she didn't trust the humanist in herself enough to insist that the scientists acknowledge the part of the mind-body equation they routinely ignore. She does tell us that as long as scientists see the body as "mostly a thing, an object of study to be dissected, measured, and analyzed . . . subjective realities and references" - that is, the psychological forces that drive and shape us - "are necessarily eliminated." Then, instead of arguing this vital point, Hustvedt adds lamely, "These, too, have something to teach us." SUCH SENTIMENTS APPEAR again and again throughout this book. Hustvedt repeatedly gives herself over to the language of science - which, when applied to the right subject, is illuminating, but when applied to the wrong one can be jarring. For example, she walks into an exhibition of paintings of women by Picasso, de Kooning and Beckmann and, wanting her reader to be right there with her, she begins: "Contemporary neurological research on emotion is attempting to parse the complex affective processes at work in visual perception." On occasion, this approach can seem so off the mark as to offend. Take the essay on suicide. "It is a sign of the times that neuroscientists are looking for the genetic causes of suicide," Hustvedt tells us. "The findings that suicide victims have reduced levels of the neurochemical serotonin and its major metabolite (5-HIAA) as opposed to those who died for other reasons have drawn the most attention." Of course, she demurs, it goes without saying that while "human beings are surely made of cells," a simplistic reduction to "genes, neurochemicals, and synaptic connectivity . . . cannot tell us anything about a person's thoughts when she makes the decision to kill herself." Nevertheless, Hustvedt, in thrall to abstractions, wonders in a speculative voice: "What does it mean to kill yourself, to kill your 'self'? What is being attacked and/or escaped from? There is no consensus about what a self is. Its contours change or even vanish, depending on your particular perspective - philosophical, psychological or neurobiological." This stunned me. Surely, I thought, no one who has ever stood over the actual body of an actual suicide has ever wondered what it means to kill the self. I, for one, have known my fair share of women and men whom I have loved and could not save from selfdestruction because they felt compelled to not live. To stand, even for a moment, at the edge of that emotional abyss into which the candidate for suicide stares daily - and to be aware that it is only a matter of time before he or she dives in - is to be in the presence of one of the great mysteries of human existence; one that language, especially the impoverished language of science, cannot demystify. Hustvedt acknowledges as much, though hers is an intellectualizing sensibility. I think she is happiest - and makes the reader happiest - in the presence of the great abstractions derived from the analytic intelligence. What is missing from the pages of her book is only an equal abundance of felt life. Hustvedt wants artists and scientists to value each other's way of taking in experience. VIVIAN GORNICK'S most recent book is "The Odd Woman and the City."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Exceptionally gifted novelist and essayist Hustvedt, on par with Marilynne Robinson, is an ardently curious, caring, and eloquent thinker and writer inspired equally by the arts, neuroscience, and philosophy. This major collection of essays written between 2011 and 2015 follows the equally substantial nonfiction volume Living, Thinking, Looking (2012) and her award-winning sixth novel, The Blazing World (2014). Hustvedt performs quickening investigations into the depiction of women by the painters Beckmann, de Kooning, and Picasso, and the male body by Mapplethorpe; the undervaluing of women artists, with special attention paid to Louise Bourgeois; and the extreme valuation of Jeff Koons. As she incisively considers works by filmmaker Wim Wenders, literary artist Karl Ove Knausgaard, and painter Anselm Kiefer, Hustvedt illuminates the dynamics of perception and the influence of expectation and context. As she delves ever more deeply into the mind/body, reason/passion, sex/gender splits, she parses the writings of such influential figures as Kierkegaard and Richard Dawkins and ponders her own mysterious synesthesia and the circular challenges of studying mental processes. Though these are erudite and intellectually sophisticated essays, Hustvedt is beguiling and wholly present in each lively, first-person, thrillingly interdisciplinary narrative as she scrutinizes human nature, especially the essential role emotion plays in memory, learning, empathy, morality, and art.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this erudite collection, novelist Hustvedt (The Blazing World) explores philosophical questions central to the humanities using research from other disciplines, such as biology, feminist theory, and neuroscience. The questions relate to the self, epistemology, and art and literature, among other things. In the middle portion of the book, in an essay that ought to become canonical, Hustvedt examines the problematic underpinnings of current scientific fads such as evolutionary psychology and computational theory of mind. Her lengthy exercise in phenomenology provides a dense, succinct overview of the mind/body problem, which "has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks." The questions that preoccupy Hustvedt are the questions of a novelist, but they take consciousness itself as their subject: Where do ideas come from? How do stories get created? What is reflective self-consciousness, and how is it formed? What role do imagination, emotion, memory, and the unconscious play in this thing we call mind? The book conveys the wide range of Hustvedt's reading as she focuses on the interstices between people; between disciplines; and between concepts such as art and science, truth and fiction, feeling and perception. The research is sound and the scholarship engaging, and the exacting prose turns humorous and almost warm when Hustvedt incorporates her personal reflections, exhibiting, as she says of the artist Louise Bourgeois, "a quick mind, interested above all in its own contents." (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
Hustvedt's (The Blazing World; The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves) essays, written between 2011 and 2015, make for a weighty, thought-provoking collection. Divided into three sections, the anthology weaves science and the humanities together with a critical eye and a personal touch. The author's central claims throughout, whether writing about art or the mind/body problem, are "all human knowledge is partial" and everyone is influenced by her or his "community of thinkers or researchers." As a result, much of what is delivered by the media as truth or fact is open to question. And question Hustvedt does, leading readers from one idea to the next as she examines something as simple as a hairdo or as complex as memory and imagination. She even attempts to find an answer to the perennial query about where authors get their ideas. Verdict An excellent and fearlessly wide-ranging collection that never stops at the easy answer but continually probes deeper. Not for casual, comfort, or fluff reading, this title demands attention and thought, but the effort is rewarded. [See Prepub Alert, 6/19/16.]-Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis © Copyright 2017. 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
What are we? That question informs the authors fertile inquiry into mind, brain, and imagination.Taking the perspective of a perpetual outsider who looks in on several disciplines, Hustvedt (Psychiatry/Weill Medical School; The Blazing World, 2014, etc.) gathers recent essays and talks on the intellectual topics that have long occupied her: art and perception, the mind/body conundrum, madness, consciousness, memory, and empathy. She organizes these pieces into three sections: A Woman Looking at Men Looking At Women, which considers the works of Picasso, Koons, and Louise Bourgeois; an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs curated by filmmaker Pedro Almodvar; Wim Wenders homage to choreographer Pina Bausch; and the authors experience teaching writing to mental patients and undergoing psychoanalysis herself. The second and third sections, Delusions of Certainty and What Are We? consider more directly issues of mind and consciousness: What is a person, a self? Is there a self? What is a mind? Is a mind different from a brain? Hustvedt feels decidedly unsatisfied by the results of fMRI investigations that map brain activity during such events as reading or looking at art. That research, she maintains, reflects a simplistic correspondence between a psychological stateand its neural correlates, without much thought about further meanings or the philosophical issues involved. Nor does she have patience for the assertions of neo-DarwinistsHarvard psychologist Steven Pinker comes in for repeated criticismwho justify why things are the way they are by privileging nature over nurture and insisting that certain traits (men being better at mathematics than women, for example) are rooted in biology. Hustvedt draws uponand presents with sharp claritya prodigious number of sources, including Kierkegaard (whom she first read when she was 15), William James, Kant, George Lakoff (for his investigation of metaphors), physicist Niels Bohr, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and 17th-century scientist Margaret Cavendish, an adamant materialist who took issue with Descartes mind/body dualism, as does Hustvedt.A wide-ranging, irreverent, and absorbing meditation on thinking, knowing, and being. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
