Perhaps no imperative cliché is disobeyed more often than “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” And with good cause; you can learn a decent amount about a book this way. Take Elisa Gabbert’s “The Word Pretty.” Its deep blue cover, with its elegantly minimalist font and picture of a woman ambiguously hiding her face with her hands — is she crying or laughing? Ashamed? Repulsed? — manages to be both unassuming and striking, austere and inviting.
“The Word Pretty” is also of a surpassingly pleasing size. (We’ll get to its insides soon.) It is a book that can comfortably fit in your back pocket. This has been rigorously fact-checked using more than one pair of the reviewer’s jeans. Given the time of year, another useful unit of measurement might be the stocking, to which this book feels almost perfectly tailored.
All of these superficial elements — the visual appeal, the easy portability — are appropriate, because if the book’s contents were to be summarized in one word, the word might be “companionable.”
In this collection of brief essays, Gabbert, who is also a poet, draws inspiration for her musings from subjects like group selfies and the psychology of dreams and YouTube videos “designed specifically to make people cry.” She makes points about consumerism, self-image and the optimization of happiness.
But more than half of the book is explicitly devoted to books themselves; to life as both a purposeful and a serendipitous reader. Much of this material is winningly geeky and enthusiastic: “As front matter goes, I get especially giddy about translator’s notes, and for years I’ve toyed with the idea of editing an anthology of them.” And: “I’m obsessed with books about people who, for unclear reasons, ruin their own lives.” In the category of book titles, she disapproves of the “rhythmic sing-songiness” of those like “I Know This Much Is True” and “All the Light We Cannot See.” She adds: “As far as meter goes, I think spondees make for the best, snappiest titles: ‘White Noise.’ ‘Jane Eyre.’ ‘Bleak House.’ ”
Gabbert remembers picking up a book at the library, only to put it back when she realized it was written as “one long incantatory paragraph,” according to its cover copy. “I have no desire to read a book without paragraph breaks,” she writes. “A lack of white space on the page makes me feel a little panicky, like being on a train in an underground tunnel — what’s my exit strategy?”
More than once while reading “The Word Pretty,” I fondly remembered Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader,” published 20 years ago, with essay titles like “My Odd Shelf,” “Never Do That to a Book” and “Words on a Flyleaf.” Fadiman’s book came before, and Gabbert’s book comes after, the golden age of blogs, but they both share some of that medium’s strengths. They’re loose-limbed and low-stakes. There aren’t enough books like these. They offer the pleasure of personal essays that are more inquisitive and obsessive than self-centered, and they are pitched squarely at readers. They are almost, in the way they spring from and itemize the act of reading, meta-books.
Like any good magpie, Gabbert keeps the delightful facts coming, and often leads into them the way she might at a dinner party, with some version of: “I read somewhere that … .” In this vein, she notes that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is difficult to translate into Japanese because of “insect appreciation” — meaning, in short, that the Japanese might not find it all that gross or jarring to wake up as a giant bug. In a piece about the establishment of time in fiction, she writes about someone who studies caves and has lived in them for longish stretches to find out what his daily use of time would look like without any sunlight or conventional obligations to dictate it.
One essay here is titled “The Point of Tangency: On Digression,” and one way to describe this collection is as a series of tangents.
Which is not to say that Gabbert never builds a sustained argument or alights on a sturdy point. One essay starts as a series of thoughts about overwriting and excess. (“I’ve always enjoyed excess in art, up to and including Jeff Koons’ giant Mylar balloon dogs, as a kind of celebration, and magnification, of its central lack of necessity.”) But near the end, Gabbert transitions into an analysis of what she considers “the primary pitfall of memoir — an overeagerness to auto-analyze, and a false finality to the analysis.” In just three or four paragraphs, she brilliantly parses something you might have felt about dozens of memoirs without ever putting it quite this way.
The book’s modesty can occasionally feel like the result of rough cutting rather than design, surely due in part to the fact that these pieces have been gathered from their original sources; many were first published on The Smart Set, an online magazine. It’s a short book, and ideas and images recur — sometimes in a way that feels intentional and rewarding, but just as often in a way that feels unplanned and unnecessary. When Gabbert mentions for a second time that she fantasizes in the third person, one wonders if she knows she’s doing it. “Bedroom in Alcatraz,” about the diagram of a prison cell, first appeared in Territory, an online site about maps, and it feels out of place having been uprooted from its original context and planted in this book’s soil.
But then the casualness of this collection is one of its attractions. It doesn’t strain after anything. It doesn’t have airs, and if it could speak, it would likely charmingly admit to its own imperfections. A mixture of depth and diversion, it makes you wish that, like a reliable band, Gabbert might publish a similar slender volume every year or two.
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Publication Notes:
‘The Word Pretty’
By Elisa Gabbert
158 pages. Black Ocean. $18.95.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.