Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins (review)

Under the broad umbrella of creative nonfiction, Michael Martone's new collection, Racing in Place, is firmly in the tradition of the personal essay. Each piece is a "loose sally of the mind," as Samuel Johnson once described the form, a rumination on a topic with no apparent general interest until the writer brings a sharp intellect and a distinctive style to bear. Intellectual playfulness is, in fact, one of Martone's strengths, and as I read his book, I found myself making comparisons to Montaigne, the granddaddy of the form, who wondered once in an essay whether he was playing with the cat or the cat with him.

Martone brings a variety of techniques to the task. He likes repetitions—which jar at first, but, after some thought, seem right. He conveys the twitching quality of the letters on one of those old flickering neon signs this way: "I can't forget the illusion of those letters floating above Fort Wayne, stitched and twitching against the velvet of the night sky, or its simple message of a C-I-T-Y of light, of L-I-G-H-T all lit up." In another essay he describes the difficulty he has talking to his psychiatrist in words that capture the obsessive nature of the experience. "He doesn't know a thing about me yet as I haven't told him a thing, and I am sitting stone still in his office thinking about what I have to tell him and how funny that is since what I have to tell him is about telling."

He also likes puns—the lowest of literary devices—and makes them work by letting them ring true. "The crowd cheering at the end of our song had one voice, a static static." Somehow, that seems right. In another essay he maintains anonymity by using initials instead of names, calling one character who has upset him "D." Later he writes that he is "depressed, depressed with a small D." The fact that he writes "small D" but uses the capital letter in the phrase is clever indeed. In the hands of a lesser writer, these verbal high jinks might seem silly or arbitrary, but in Martone's work they tie into the rhetorical strategy of the essay in each case and create an intriguing surface.

The style is disarming. One of my favorite essays in the book uses the fact that Martone lived by a golf course as the springboard for his thoughts about aesthetics. The essay is segmented into 17 sections, each reading like a prose poem. Slowly, and with great beauty, these separate pieces explore our urge to create pastoral illusions in our lives. For Martone, the golf course is a work of artifice superimposed on the ordinary world. Due to its familiarity and our longing for pastoral scenes, it appears to be an unobtrusive imposition on reality; but we occasionally sense the truth about this carefully manicured illusion when a golf ball veers off course and winds up in the swamps and tall grasses of reality. Are we playing with the cat or the cat with us? Martone's clever style allows him to explore a philosophical subject without becoming pedantic or doctrinaire.

The emotional control imposed by his cleverness is also a way for him to distance himself from difficult subjects. In the best essays, this stylistic restraint makes the pain that he is skirting more real, more intense, than if he had taken it head on, without all of the verbal play. The essay about his grandfather who worked for "The City of Power and Light" is particularly moving as it describes the man who "went door to door bringing light, bringing power"—not because his emotion is special, but because the writing is engaging. The essay "What I Want to Tell," which describes the deadly subject of academic infighting in a creative writing department, is a wrenching account of the office battle that drove him...