That’s not to say that hermit crab essays don’t teach us to think critically about that blurriness. Rather, they do just the opposite: They call attention to the ways that cultural forms and expectations create reality.
Acknowledging that the truth is not absolute—rather unknowable—she reconciles herself to the groundlessness she had known since leaving the security of her family's righteousness: “In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.”
This book, like all of Tea's best writing, bristles with life and a fierce intellect. Her voice is as distinct as ever, and her ability to conjure something—an album cover, the feeling of a hangover—in just a few phrases, like Zorro (zip, zip, zip!) is still wonderfully intact.
Florida is not a “land of contrasts,” and Groff avoids this flimsy and inaccurate conceit. Instead, she incarnates Florida’s grotesque continuity, warping the line between past and present, spirit and flesh, flourishing and decay.
O’Leary’s project is ambitious: “The work of these poets suggests that a secular art, even in a secular age, is insufficient for representing reality completely. There must be sacred art. For poets, this means there must be religious poetry written.”
What's taken for granted in any first-person novel or memoir is now suddenly missing, and what we get in return is a revelation: a character defined as the reflective surface all others cast themselves onto.
All of Bullwinkel’s stories unlock something. The strongest pieces fling the whole thing open. Burn the house down. Others are a mere suggestion of what lies outside, a hint that things are not as they appear. That is like life.
In the shadow of The Mars Room, middlebrow literary fiction, with its urbane cosmopolitanism, its careers and affairs and families and houses, seems pale, stuffy drawing-room drama drained of vitality or force.
Heti’s project seems to be to push the limits of the Female, to upend the necessity of Mother, to suggest whole worlds that might exist beyond the making of other smaller versions of ourselves. But what her book also does is remind us of the limits, both of our bodies and our thoughts.
That is the deeper secret to recovery, that force of constructive listening, the almost osmotic process of drawing the pain out of a human being in crisis and allowing it to settle, if only for an hour, in the body of the group.
Tillman is not asking how should a person be or how does the world look, but rather, how does a person become? And how do images complicate these notions of ourselves and this desire to become someone else?