|
Two years or so ago essayist-teacher-writer Sven Birkerts created something of a stir with a book, THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES, that dismissed the printed book as we have known it as a doomed species. Now, evidently wanting to get on the record before the last publisher's press falls silent, he has checked in with a volume of autobiographical essays.
MY SKY BLUE TRADES (the title is from Dylan Thomas and means roughly "my heedless youthful escapades") is not a full-bore autobiography. It covers only the first half or so of Birkerts's 50 years among us, and is more a series of discrete snapshots from specific times in his life than a connected narrative. The trajectory is familiar: Suburban childhood (near Detroit), rebellion against conventional parents, the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll scene in college, rootless wanderings around Europe and the US, unfulfilled stirrings of literary ambitions, a series of relationships of varying intensities with women, unsatisfying menial jobs here and there, and finally in his mid-20s a double breakthrough: first literary recognition, then a relationship that led to marriage, children, and suburban Boston residence. The book's final tableau is a family gathering celebrating Birkerts's parents' golden wedding anniversary. Birkerts is stingy with exact dates, but one can deduce that he was born in 1952.
Birkerts is a good writer and tosses off some very vivid phrases in telling this fairly ordinary story. He is colorful and evocative, for instance, in detailing his family history (both of his parents were born in Latvia) and his own early desire to cut himself off from that history. He did not want to be called by his foreign-sounding first name, for one thing, and so was called "Peter" until about age 30. Nowhere in this book does anyone address him as "Sven."
He is also candid about his uneasy relationship with his father, a successful architect and the archetypal stiff-necked parent who deplores his child's long hair, B. O., and hippie friends. That cozy final anniversary party scene comes as a bit of a surprise after all the generational conflict in earlier pages.
The one pitfall that Birkerts cannot entirely avoid is self-absorption. He takes it for granted that the reader is deeply interested in the workings of his mind, his personal relationships with others much like himself, what he reads and what music he listens to, and his protracted struggle to prove to himself that he really is a writer. All this can be interesting, of course, when we know that we are dealing with the formative years of a genuinely interesting and important person. Birkerts is doing pretty well, but he has not yet reached the point where his extended post-adolescent musings are of real public interest. There is a certain amount of solipsistic hot air in this book along with a good deal of sharply observed and neatly shaped prose. The procession of women in his life --- let's see, there's Beth, Jess, Marcie, Terri, and maybe one or two others I have forgotten --- leads finally to his wife Lynn, who appears seven pages from the end of the book, a kind of afterthought, and gets her name into his paragraph of acknowledgments.
MY SKY BLUE TRADES is a kind of 21st century A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN --- but Sven Birkerts, though a talented fellow, is not quite yet James Joyce.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
© Copyright 1996-2010, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
