I liked Lopate's Against Joie de Vivre enough to purchase Portrait of My Body a few weeks later. Again, Lopate delves into himself and presents his findings with self-deprecation, where warranted, and assertion, even indignance, when it's called for. It's a pleasure to find someone who expresses himself so well and with such uncommon sense.

If his essays have a flaw, it's in his overaffection for the past. Lopate knows this aspect of himself, and says as much: the desire to dwell in rich remembrance of certain times and places; an inclination I share with him. At times it waylays his clear-eyed observations, and perhaps his editorial judgment, as in his clunker in Joi de Vivre: an overlong essay on Houston, Lopate's adopted city.

In this book, I found it influenced his portrait of the West Village, a place I know too, and in a similar manner: Lopate lived on Bank Street, and I was around the corner on Perry, at roughly the same time, both of us looking back at the past while there. Contemplating those narrow, old-fashioned streets, recalling his bohemian friends and acquaintances, nostalgia nudges enough of Lopate's acuity aside so that his piece settles too much on two literary characters he knew, who serve as personifications of the place; always a tricky gambit, and one that didn't work for me here.

Then again, perhaps it's because Lopate's highs are so high that they call attention to the pieces that fall short. And in this book, what he has to say about the contemporary Jewish attitude toward the concentration camps--the Holocaust, as it's all but universally called now, a "superlative" that he critically examines--sums up and goes beyond the arguments a Jew hears at Passover, or whenever the state of Israel comes up in conversation. After reading it, I had the notion of making copies and carrying them around with me in case I found myself among relatives, so I wouldn't have to waste my breath, as usual, but just hand out Lopate's essay like a pamphlet. ( )