Mystery and manners

WRITER and art critic Siri Hustvedt’s impressive third novel, “What I Loved,” established her as one of the most talented voices in contemporary fiction. Rich in passion and ideas, the novel brings to life characters of extraordinary depth and humanity and conjures up paintings and art installations so vividly that one can almost touch them. Hustvedt brings the same visual power, sensuality and intelligence to her collection of essays “A Plea for Eros.” Written over a decade (1995-2005), these lively personal and literary pieces cover a dizzying range of subjects -- autobiography, sexuality, wearing a corset, Sept. 11, the actor Franklin Pangborn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Dickens.

What unifies and makes this collection so compelling is the way in which Hustvedt weaves evocative memories and stories with her intellectual meditations. In the book’s finest piece, “Yonder,” she lovingly re-creates the three places in her life: Minnesota, where she was born and rebelled against a culture of conformity; Norway, her mother’s and paternal grandparents’ native country, where she spent three happy years; and New York, which she embraced when she moved there in 1978 to go to graduate school at Columbia and where she now lives with her husband, the writer Paul Auster. Her recollections bloom into reflections on how places live in our minds or are imagined to illustrate a story, and on the nature of memory and the imagination. The imagination and fiction, she muses, are a kind of memory or “remembering what never happened.”

Her observation that we use “I see” for “I understand” because we create pictures to understand the world also describes the theory behind her writing and what makes her prose so alive: She distills an idea from an image or illuminates her concepts with stories. The tale of how her Uncle David, on his first day in New York from Norway, bit into what he thought was a perfect apple but was actually a tomato (which he spit out in disgust) becomes a parable that encapsulates “the lesson of expectation and reality.” A story (from the Chinese version of the “Kinsey Report”) of a Chinese couple who thought that sleeping next to each other was enough to have a child illustrates that there cannot be much erotic life without an encouraging erotic culture.

Hustvedt rejects feminist (and all other) dogma. In the essay “A Plea for Eros,” recounting her own experiences, she declares that both women and men are sexual objects and points out that “to pretend that ambiguity doesn’t exist in sexual relations is just plain stupid.” In “Being a Man,” she sees herself in her dreams both as a man and as a woman and concludes that this duality is part of being human. She tapped into her masculine side to invent the male narrator of “What I Loved,” but she also enjoyed wearing a whalebone corset for eight days as an extra in a 1997 film version of Henry James’ “Washington Square.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, Hustvedt saw from her window in Brooklyn the damage wrought by the first hijacked airplane, and her tender piece “9/11, or One Year Later” reflects on how kind New Yorkers were with one another after the tragedy. For weeks, people asked one another if they had lost someone. The city, she found, gradually reverted to its old ways -- loud, raucous and nasty -- but it doesn’t dim her view of New York as a wonderful city of immigrants, pluralism and tolerance. Her plea for ambiguity and mystery in matters of the heart reverberates throughout the collection, particularly in her literary criticism. In “The Bostonians: Personal and Impersonal Words,” she observes that in James’ world there are no absolutes and, quoting James, “in the arts, feeling is always meaning.” Like all his novels, “The Bostonians” is “an investigation of what happens between and among people.”

In “Gatsby’s Glasses,” Hustvedt argues that “The Great Gatsby” ultimately shows how dreams or fiction are necessary to life because they give it meaning. The dense and almost overwhelming essay “Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment” draws on Dickens’ novel “Our Mutual Friend,” linguistics, psychoanalysis, neurobiology and her own memories, to meditate on the fragility of the self and its relation to the other.

Though rigorously intellectual, Hustvedt is also down to earth, funny and playful. In the light piece on Pangborn, she recounts how a hotel manager in Paris, excited to see Gerard Depardieu, who was meeting with Hustvedt and Auster, started flapping his arms (just like a Pangborn character) and made a fool of himself. The short, anecdotal “Living With Strangers” humorously describes one coping technique perfected by New Yorkers -- “pretend it isn’t happening.”

Hustvedt is not afraid to express her deep love for her family or share her vulnerabilities. In the autobiographical “Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self,” we learn that she was frail at birth, that she suffers from severe migraine headaches and that she carries inside her “a sensation of being wounded.” Writing for her is “an answer to the wounded self,” and by the end of “A Plea for Eros,” we have been charmed by her lucid prose and vibrant ideas and feel as if we know her intimately. *