A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces - Softcover

Weschler, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226893901 ISBN 13: 9780226893907

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2006

Synopsis

“There is something both marvelous and hilarious,” writes Lawrence Weschler, “in watching the humdrum suddenly take flight. This is, in part, a collection of such launchings.”

Indeed, the eight essays collected in A Wanderer in the Perfect City do soar into the realm of passion as Weschler profiles people who “were just moseying down the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly and almost spontaneously, they caught fire, they became obsessed, they became intensely focused and intensely alive.” With keen observations and graceful prose, Weschler carries us along as a teacher  of rudimentary English from India decides that his destiny is to promote the paintings of an obscure American abstract expressionist; a gifted poker player invents a more exciting version of chess; an avant-garde Russian émigré conductor speaks Latin, exclusively, to his infant daughter; and Art Spiegelman composes Maus. But simple summaries can’t do these stories justice: like music, they derive their character from digressions and details, cadence and tone. And like the upwelling of passion Weschler’s characters feel, they are better experienced than explained.  

“Weschler seems so hungry for life that the rest of us become hungry for him . . . a magician, a performer, and a scholar. All in one.”—from the Foreword by Pico Iyer 

“Weschler’s essays are exquisitely written—so perfectly and unobtrusively organized that one can’t imagine telling them a better way.” —New York Times Book Review
“Weschler is the owner of a large dose of novelistic vision, and a particularly poetic set of ears, but . . . as important an endowment as a novelist’s eye or a poet’s ear is still the journalistic nose which led him down the proverbial alley.”—National Post (Canada) 

“Weschler is a thoughtful observer and a superb storyteller.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

About this title

Review:

A few months ago, a friend I was talking with began to tell me about a friend of his named Gary Isaacs, who was working at the downtown headquarters of one of the city's top investment houses as an executive in the division monitoring the savings-and-loan crisis. Though Isaacs was just thirty-two years old, my friend recounted, he had previously worked on the Street in several other capacities as well, and before that he'd had a notably successful career in an entirely different field; what's more, it seemed he was about to quit this one, too, and to head off in yet another direction. When I asked my friend what the previous career had been, and, for that matter, what the new one was going to be, he replied that it would be far more entertaining for me to hear the whole story from the man himself, which is how, a few days later, I came to find myself in the sleek elevator of one of downtown's better-known headquarters zooming up towards I didn't have the faintest idea what.

Lawrence Weschler is, simply put, one of the best journalists ever to have written for the New Yorker--of an equal rank to masters like Joseph Mitchell, Philip Hamburger, and John McPhee. Most of the articles in this volume were first published in 1988 as Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs's Bills, and Other True-Life Tales (the story of Boggs has been extracted and expanded into its own book); each of them profiles a creative individual who "works and works at something, which then happens of its own accord: it would not have happened without all the prior work, true, but its happening cannot be said to have resulted from all that work, the way effects are said to result from a series of causes." For republication, Weschler has provided updates on each of his subjects, from Maus creator Art Spiegelman to the now-deceased musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky (whom Weschler profiled at the age of 92, and arguably at the peak of his career). He's also added two new "passion pieces," including a profile of comic artist Ben Katchor. A Wanderer in the Perfect City is as close to perfect as books get, and my advice to you is to get a copy, read it, and then reread it whenever your faith in literature needs restoring. If at all possible, get two copies, so you can share this graceful anthology yet never have to part with it. (Oh, and in case you were wondering, Gary Isaacs was a former rocket scientist who ran away from Wall Street to join the circus.) --Ron Hogan

About the Author:

A widely honored journalist, Lawrence Weschler is the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He is the author of twelve books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Vermeer in Bosnia, and, most recently, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0226893901
• ISBN 13: 9780226893907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308