Charles D'Ambrosio

D'Ambrosio's colection of essays, [Loitering], is wonderful. So, I wanted to try his fiction. The writing is workmanlike but doesn't have the same flashes of greatness as the essays. The most memorable story features a boy who frequently is left to escort drunk men and women home from his mother's parties. The boy ends up a collector of all the rumors and gossip of these people's lives. Another stand out was the tale of a young couple's grief after the loss of their child. But, on balance, the stories didn't resonate near as well as D'Ambrosio's more personal non-fiction.

3 bones!!!… (more)

Part of my reading practice is to keep a slip of paper or notebook to scribble thoughts or words to look up. For D'Ambrosio's collection of essays, I needed a big piece of paper for the latter. Beyond to often overly esoteric subject matter, D'Ambrosio sometimes seems to be writing for the purpose of displaying his otherworldly vocabulary. Funny enough, the last word I had to look up - pleonasm - rendered a definition that was almost on point for a one-word review: "the use of more words than necessary to denote mere sense." While all of that seems like I didn't like the book, the opposite is true. He is a keen observer of humans and human behavior, and extremely frank with his own history and pain. My favorite essay was the lead, dealing with his observations from the street during a volatile police call over a man barricaded in an apartment with a gun. I also quite enjoyed his essays dealing with literary topics and writers, save for the last one during which he went on a deep exegetical dive through a poem, plumbing farther than almost anyone would into the writing - and farther, I suspect, than any poet on their own work. On balance, a very enjoyable book.… (more)