In Conversation With Our Contemporaries

In her recent collection Possibility: Essays Against Despair, released earlier this year from Sarabande Books, Patricia Vigderman pairs the unlikely with the unlikelier. Conversations and meditations on Marcel Proust, W. G. Sebald, George Eliot, and David Foster Wallace work simultaneously—and often seamlessly—with the abstract and deeply personal: a consideration of Japanese art, a town in southwestern Texas, the hit film Vertigo, photography, and even depression. The collection is “like attending an ideal dinner party,” Mona Simpson writes astutely, “where everyone has read your favorite books,” but perhaps even more than that, one where the guests are the authors themselves, and they’ve very happy to oblige.

An experienced and talented writer in her own right—Vigderman’s earlier work includes The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner (2007), and she is a recent recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities—Vigderman’s collection remains startlingly green, as yet untainted by cynicism or recent lofty conversations on navel-gazing. Instead, Vigderman’s prose insists upon art as she prefers it, indeed, as many of us often employ it: as a mechanism for understanding the self or the reality we find ourselves in. Beautiful things, Vigderman seems to argue, are made more beautiful upon application.

As a whole, the collection brings to mind a discussion on New York photographer Richard Renaldi, whose latest work—“Touching Strangers”—pairs unlikely residents of New York City in roles that bespeak familiarity: siblings, lovers, neighbors, an elderly woman and her only grandson. Renaldi began the project six years ago and to date has collected hundreds of unlikely and intimate portraits whose sentiments—for both the viewer and the subject—strike a remarkably authentic tone. What proves most interesting about Renaldi’s work is his capacity to forge an authentic sentiment from absolute inauthenticity, for while Renaldi is responsible for posing his subjects, he is in no way imparting any interior feeling. The subjects bring that themselves. Reports one subject, “I felt like I cared for her, like it broke down a lot of barriers.”

Said another, “It was nice to feel that comfort.”

But perhaps the most thought-provoking comment of all came from a middle-age woman, whom Renaldi paired with two young, blond teens, both of them in short-shorts and cowboy boots, leaning idyllically into her frame. “We’re probably missing so much,” she said, “about the people all around us.”

Most photographers are known for capturing existence as it is, yet Renaldi has tapped into something more elusory, more enigmatic: he is capturing humanity for what it might be, indeed, what many of us wish it would be. And isn’t it curious how seemingly easily?

My reason for mentioning Renaldi is two-fold: beyond feeling allowed—indeed, invited—to use another artist’s work to further inform and explore my own, Renaldi’s work seems founded upon the same main principle I perceive in Vigderman’s collection. For while on the surface, Possibility: Essays Against Despair may seem a myriad of conversations about art and life, the collection appears instead to be a meta-observation on human thought: repeated moments of inspiration she finds as a conscious observer, listener, and reader, and she translates that energy into her prose.

On more than one occasion, Vigderman cites a trait she loves most about an artist, then attempts to master it on the page. In describing her experience reading Sebald’s Austerlitz, for example, she writes, “I find I am reading it very slowly, almost word by word, following its winding sentences and paragraphs, and looking at its strange photographs . . . and sometimes going back and rereading pages or looking at how many pages are necessary for one paragraph (twenty-five is not unusual). I would say the effect is dreamlike, entrancing, except that the associativeness, the quiet shifts and turnings, are also keeping me alert.”

So, too, are Vigderman’s, for this is precisely my reading experience. Like so many great writers whose voices are...