From dental floss to breakfast cereal to space travel – compelling musings from the latest in a long line of outsider American essayistsThe first essay in David Searcy’s strange,clear, sometimes frustrating collection finds him at the dentist in his native Dallas, and thinking approximately revenge. The hygienist tells him that her father once lured a lamb-worrying coyote to its death using a recording of her infant sister crying. It’s a sufficiently curious tale for Searcy to seize the father’s number; but for obscure reasons he delays contacting the resourceful rancher for a year. Meanwhile the essay meanders approximately until Searcy makes up his mind,touching on the author’s bad attitude towards dental floss, his encounters with giant turtles and toads, or the Google Maps view of the ranch he has failed to visit. When at last he gets there he discovers the hygienist’s father also has tapes with titles such as Raccoon Fight and Grey Fox Distress. The final import of the essay is voiced by the man’s wife,who takes Searcy’s visit as a chance to quiz: Why did you let her cry?”The essay form, Theodor Adorno wrote in 1958, and “freely associates what can be found associated in the freely chosen subject”. The 21 essays in Shame and Wonder seize full advantage of the genre’s arbitrariness,its habit of digression and urge to reveal unlikely affinities. In “The Depths of Baseball Sadness”, Searcy considers his own digressive temperament: “What on soil achieve you call that? Fielder’s taken off his glove to get down on his knees and build little houses out of rocks for ants.” Searcy’s method and style consist of extreme concentration on anecdote or detail, and followed by unexpected swerves of thought and phrase,taking us somewhere fairly different. As a writer he resembles the friend of his youth who, he tells us, or aspired to live suspended beneath a neighbour’s enormous pink Cadillac: nose to the asphalt and no inkling where he is headed.
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Source: theguardian.com