THE AMATEUR: An Independent Life of Letters

THE AMATEUR: An Independent Life of Letters. By Wendy Lesser. Pantheon. 274 pp. $24

In the "overture" to these interlocking autobiographical sketches, Lesser aptly describes herself as "an 18th-century man of letters, though one who happens to be female and lives in 20th-century Berkeley." The Amateur is a bracing memoir of a one-ofa-kind life that has been shaped by an addiction to (of all things) books, dances, paintings, plays, photographs, poems—and by a deep need to judge, not merely enjoy, them.

As I learned the minute I met her (we were on a book prize committee together years ago), Lesser has the intimidating gift of great clarity and certitude about what she likes and what she doesn’t like in life, which for her comprises "mainly, other people and works of art." Yet she is anything but dogmatic. The Amateur helps to explain how Lesser has skirted that danger, and in the process become the boldly eclectic editor of the Threepenny Review, the literary quarterly she founded in 1980; the subtly discriminating author of four very different books of (for want of a neater term) cultural-social-literary criticism; and, not least, a self-portraitist who has what many fiercely opinionated people lack—calm (and often comic) perspective on herself and her era.

There was never much fear that "brash, impatient, judgmental, loud, energetic, efficient" Lesser, born in Palo Alto in 1952, would get lost in the unrest of the 1960s or in the comparatively unstructured life she led as an English graduate student during the 1970s. Instead, she found latitude for her own "relatively untutored ominivorousness," and she also had a chance to exercise "what one Berkeley friend calls my ‘unremittingly linear’ mind." By the 1980s and 1990s, she had carved out a precarious literary existence outside the academy, "on the fringes of the economy." And she was launched on a rigorous mission to understand and evaluate "the experience that takes place when a reader or oberver or auditor encounters a work of art: that meeting place between one person’s sensibility and another person’s creation."

Lesser’s own sensibility is unfailingly independent but never willfully idiosyncratic. She is not shy about being "the learned critic, commenting on the work," or about sharing what it is like to be "the novice, being molded by that work." Writing about the Balkan folk dancing that was once her passionate pastime, she finds an analogy to the welcoming but demanding conversation her criticism aims to set in motion. "It was a place," she recalls, "in which everyone was accepted, but in which discriminations (of grace, skill, knowledge) nonetheless mattered. It was a kind of community that was ideal for someone who was essentially, secretly solitary." In a culture ever more balkanized between high and low, academic and popular, creative and critical, cerebral and visceral, Lesser reminds us of the distinctions that matter.

—Ann Hulbert