A reverie runs through it

OVER the course of a writer’s life, ideas accrue. They appear on hand-scribbled notes that pile up in drawers and catch-alls, accumulate in rarely opened computer files and, these days, molder in buried blog posts. A good one might become an essay; a great one, a poem or even a book. But most of these nuggets of inspiration remain as they were: words jotted in haste and forgotten, even if, had they been developed as intended, they might have yielded at least an essay, if only their writer hadn’t lacked time, patience or faith.

To judge by her prodigious work on the page, Wendy Lesser lacks no such faith. Editor of the Threepenny Review and author of seven previous books, Lesser writes in “Room for Doubt” with the enormous conviction that the life she has lived and thought about in furious detail is interesting, an adjective she holds in the highest regard. (“All she ever says is that things are ‘interesting,’ ” griped one of her students, a remark Lesser considers accurate.)

Be it the impossible yen for a new Dickens novel expressed in her 1999 memoir “The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters” or the unexpected infatuation with Berlin that seizes her in “Room for Doubt,” Lesser believes her audience is patient -- patient enough to care, for instance, how long she worked refining a translation of a German essay on the musician Tom Waits or how much she paid the architect who made the table she did the work at. “I don’t know why I tell this story now,” she admits, “except that the expenditure of the architect’s time on the table and mine on the German essay seemed to bear some relation to each other.” They don’t, really, but no matter: That she bothered with such a detail is, in an odd way, delightful.

Is delight enough to sustain a book? “Out of Berlin,” her love letter to Germany’s fabled city and the first of the book’s three essays, rarely rises far above personal observation, some of it fairly casual -- the inexpensiveness of Berlin Philharmonic tickets or the city’s uncrowdedness. It also rarely sinks below rhapsodic: Lesser not only offers no negative appraisal of Berlin but also writes as if she could not bear to hear one. Reading this drifting little essay, you may wonder what she thinks she’s up to. And well you should, because the Berlin anecdotes go nowhere. Endearing as she might be, her final point -- that her sojourn in Germany made her “permanently aware of a division in myself” -- comes off as trite and forced.

But “Out of Berlin” is the setup for what’s to come. Lesser, who wrote her only novel, “The Pagoda in the Garden,” in three discrete parts, likes to organize her work in threes, each part building momentum, each necessary, if not in itself then to the next section and the work as a whole. In “Room for Doubt’s” second segment, “On Not Writing About David Hume,” a sense of purpose emerges: These are the insights of a woman who once believed she had most of the answers. Now, in middle age, having lost some friends to arguments and others to death, having fallen for a city that as a secular Jew she once thought of as bound up in its Nazi past, and having failed to finish a long-planned biography of a philosopher she thought she virtually owned, she considers the idea that her life may in some ways be turning out differently than anticipated. The book about Hume, Lesser confides, is one of the rare projects she’s never completed. “I am not the sort of writer or indeed the sort of person who has a lot of unfinished projects lying around,” she offers. But although she’d come to think of Hume as her personal philosopher, she repeatedly ran up against his contradictions: “The more I learned about David Hume, the less I could get any kind of handle on him.”

Paradoxically, in writing about not writing about Hume, Lesser produces a kind of meta-biography that manages to explain much about why Hume matters. Here was a man who professed agnosticism but found a welcome in the homes of “stiff-necked Scottish Presbyterians,” a man who refused “to draw a firm line between subjective and objective realities.” But don’t dismiss him as a man for our time, Lesser warns. On a New York City subway, she sees an advertisement for the School of Practical Philosophy, an institution that promises to make “the master philosophies of East and West” useful to the modern common man. “Was this what I had thought of doing with him,” she asks herself, “putting him to immediate use, applying him to daily life? No wonder he had resisted me.”

“On Not Writing About David Hume” is no less desultory in its structure than “Out of Berlin.” In it, Lesser alights briefly and inexplicably on Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” the differences between author Geoff Dyer’s writing voice and his real-life persona and her need to plan events to the last detail. If you’re the kind of reader who expects an essay to flow logically, like argument, the effect here is of a sort of memoirist’s attention-deficit disorder. Clearly, however, Lesser is not just writing essays. She’s confiding midlife revelations to her trusting readers as they sit by her metaphorical hearth, participating in kind. Lesser is writing the way people converse: floating among loosely connected topics, secure in her listeners’ interest. “I have lived, for most of my adult life, in the ever-widening no-man’s-land between the kingdom of Learning and the realm of Conversation,” she writes in her meditation on Hume. “It is more than likely that the desire to bridge the gap between these two worlds had a large part in making me want to write a book about David Hume, and it is equally likely that the impossibility of building such a bridge is what prevented me, in the end, from writing it.”

It’s not until the final reverie in “Room for Doubt,” “Difficult Friends,” that Lesser surrenders the better part of herself, by digging bravely into her troubled friendship with the late writer Leonard Michaels and, in the clarity following his death, assessing his impact on her and on the literary world. “Memoir,” she admits, “is possibly the easiest form to read and the hardest form to judge, since you have to remain alert at all times to the manipulations of tone and the distractions of content.” And that’s the other reason Lesser’s prose reads with an authenticity so rigorously examined it borders on bland: She resists falling into what she calls the “pitfalls of autobiographical writing,” such as “sentimentality, lurid confessionalism [and] slick charm.”

Lesser strips from her prose the self-aggrandizement, false modesty and self-conscious tics that mar so many memoirs and, in doing so, presents her life as a measure by which to understand your own. When she tells you she’s a good dancer, you believe it, because she will also tell you that’s she’s crabby, argumentative and controlling, especially compared to her congenial husband. And when she reveals that her tenacious friendship with the mercurial Michaels “gave me a public setting in which to display my ability to deal with a temperamental man,” she makes it possible to find yourself, and your own relationships, in her raw anatomy of love between friends.

“It is the habit of grief to whitewash the past,” she concludes at the end of her emotional elegy for Michaels. It is the habit of a reliable storyteller, Lesser knows and proves, to peel off the paint. Fittingly, “Room for Doubt” ends not with a contented coming-to-terms with aging and death but with an acceptance of regret as an inevitable consequence of our messy lives. It is not a comfortable ending. It is, however, a true one. *