For instance, in his discussion of To the Lighthouse he digresses: “Plot is what goes on in the rest of the world while I’m trying to remember how the light looked under the door from the hall when I was a kid and couldn’t sleep.” And so he finds the most value in the split screen meditation of the novel’s denouement, in which Lily Briscoe paints to recapture lost wonder, even while she knows it is impossible, just as Orner himself grieves not being able to read Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece for the first time, drunk, aged twenty-two, at Upper Moose Lake with his friends Goshko and Alex. Rather Orner likes best the lightning flashes in literature that inspire the conflation of personal memory with appreciation of craft.

It is a comfort for Orner to shift into criticism, where he demonstrates how reading can elevate us above our lives, and provide a soothing dislocation from the personal through assessing how others have transformed observation and as-lived experience into design: setting, character, and plot – this last element Orner’s least favorite imposition, as it speaks to the conceit of false order. The purposefulness of fatherhood helps both these losses, though it instills in him the universal fear that we will not be able to protect our children from the cold, hard world, even as we are somehow, for the most part anyway, making it on our own. In the patches of memoir he intersperses with lyrical essay on literature, Orner is excruciatingly present with his feelings – accounting for the difficult relationship he had with his father, forever unresolvable now that he is dead, and the irreclaimable marriage to M, who, despite doing much better now, refuses to let him use her full name.

In his intriguing new book Am I Alone Here? Peter Orner plays with the difference between reading and writing as therapeutic human behaviors. Am I Here Alone? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (New York, NY: Catapult, 2016)

Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner