| This collection of creative nonfiction takes advantage of the limber, liberal implications of its genre. Its methods range from memoir to speculative essay to satirical sketch, and its subjects from human foibles to the ambiguities of fate. Although many of the incidents contained in the book are sobering—fragility, mortality, and loss are prominent concerns—its impulses are lyrical, its style playful. Humor is the guiding spirit—humor as consolation, as communion, as lasting resonance, as last resort.
“Each piece coalesces to reveal a keen mind in love with words.… Many of these essays
deploy riskily mellifluous language; they all ring personal, fervent and
true.”—Publishers Weekly
“Saltzman reveals a deft touch at eliciting the revelations that can reside in the space
where fact and fiction intertwine. Alternately wise and wry, elegiac and
enlivening.”—ForeWord
Saltzman, the author of six studies on contemporary American fiction, here eschews
literary criticism in favor of essays that are personal and wide-ranging in
subject matter. Saltzman uses literary references (to Beckett, Eliot, and many
modern poets and novelists) as well as nonliterary citations to such events as
the first moon landing to add texture and haunting echoes to the themes of his essays.—Library
Journal
“Objects and Empathy is wondrous.”—Dave Wood’s Book Report
Martin Amis observes that style ‘is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is
intrinsic to perception.’ Where these essays succeed they marry the celebration
of language with acuity.… The collection is, like the work Saltzman esteems
most, risky, adventurous, inquisitive, and challenging.—Hyde Park Review of
Books |
