An assortment of pleasure and pain

Although most Americans have never heard of Jerzy Urban, this wealthy entrepreneur is a living legend in his native Poland. Over the years, his bungee-jump career moves -- starting as anti-Communist firebrand, next as spokesman for the hard-liner Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, and nowadays as the publisher of a cynical Catholic-bashing tabloid -- have also fascinated American journalist Lawrence Weschler.

“Have you lived a happy life?” the interviewer asks toward the end of a visit, sipping liqueur in his subject’s luxurious Warsaw garden.

“Absolutely, “ Urban shoots back. Then, after nostalgically recalling the prestige and excitement unique to each of his contradictory past roles, he adds, “And why not? One wouldn’t want to experience just one kind of pleasure in one’s life. One wants to sample all different kinds of pleasure.”

As if inspired by this epicurean motto, Weschler’s new nonfiction collection “Vermeer in Bosnia” (his previous book was the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder”) unfolds to a surprising smorgasbord of delights -- though there is pain on the pages, as well. A veteran staff writer for the New Yorker, Weschler has a special gift for the extended-interview-cum-portrait. His piece on Urban, called “The Troll’s Tale,” is flanked by “The Brat’s Tale” and “The Son’s Tale,” devoted to filmmaker Roman Polanski and cartoonist Art Spiegelman, respectively. Each is lively and provocative. Taken together, however, these three life studies strike sparks off one another, with their echoing themes of self-reinvention, creative energy, Jewishness and the Holocaust’s long reverberations. (As Spiegelman remarks, “The fact that my parents used to wake up in the middle of the night screaming didn’t seem especially strange to me. I suppose I thought everybody’s parents did.”) Among these essays, some dating to the 1980s, are vivid sketches of other creative powerhouses, notably the artists David Hockney, Robert Irwin and Ed Kienholz.

The volume’s intriguing title, and specifically its title essay, invite meditation on the ability of “great works of art” to both comfort and disquiet, to bear “a superplenitude of possible readings.” In the mid-1990s Weschler found himself in The Hague, covering hearings of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. There the presiding judge revealed his secret for keeping mental balance despite day after day of victims’ testimony and of gazing into the “appalling abyss” of atrocities: Whenever possible, he visited Holland’s great museums, “so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.” Weschler makes similar healing pilgrimages, leading to a wonderfully illuminating riff on Vermeer’s struggle and painterly accomplishment of peace in an era (1632-1675) at least as violent, cruel and chaotic as our own. Two additional pieces grapple with aspects of the Yugoslavian devastations.

Regarding the book’s title-essay however, a caveat emptor is in order: Beware the unimaginably grisly atrocities depicted in its opening pages. Despite Weschler’s subsequent efforts to evoke Vermeer’s canvases, this reader was not solaced, no descriptions of calm interiors could erase the shock of mental violation-by-hideous-image. Perhaps that’s a proof that nothing can substitute for the paintings themselves.

The formidable strengths of “Vermeer in Bosnia” lie in its author’s ability to elicit fabulous near-monologues from fascinating people and in his depth of cultural awareness. On the debit side, it is the nature of even the most haute journalism to fade over time, and Weschler’s dispatches are not exempt. The fact that his own prose style tends to be serviceable rather than stunning (just what is meant by “porcelain-tense Catherine Deneuve”?) becomes evident in descriptive, expository pieces such as one on “L.A. Light.” And several essays that deal with Weschler’s own family members feel paradoxically less intimate than the more outward-oriented work.

Sample all different kinds of pleasure. Certainly one of the pleasures of reading a collection such as this, from the pen of an erudite, enthusiastic observer of life, is the chance to piece together a much fuller picture of the author and his abiding tropes than can be gleaned from a few articles spaced over time. In a disarming prefatory aside, headed “Why I Can’t Write Fiction,” Weschler states that “for me ... the world as it is is overdetermined; the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation.” With all the richness of good fiction, “Vermeer in Bosnia” holds a magnifying mirror to that web.

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Vermeer in Bosnia

A Reader

Lawrence Weschler

Pantheon: 416 pp., $25.95