March 15, 2006
Kevin Kopelson, Neatness Counts
Brief review: In this slim, enjoyable book, cultural theorist and literary critic Kevin Kopelson uses the writer's desk as an airstrip from which to lift off into flights of stirring exegesis. The five linked essays, on poet Elizabeth Bishop, novelist Marcel Proust, critic Roland Barthes, playwright Tom Stoppard, and travel writer Bruce Chatwin, use the orderliness (or lack thereof) of the writer's desk as an lens through which to view the writers' literary production. They are marked by an erudition that allows Kopelson to flit effortlessly from primary text to journal to correspondence to contemporary criticism—in one paragraph, he segues from Walter Benjamin (who could easily have been the subject of an additional essay) to Banana Yoshimoto. Although at times Kopelson is too caught up in his own critical reverie—especially in the essays on Barthes and Stoppard—the writing is always felicitous. The book is highly recommended.
Links: Kopelson's page at the University of Iowa, where he teaches; the book's page at the University of Minnesota Press; an excerpt from the introduction and another from chapter four.