Will Hunt

Hunt is a gifted writer who crafts prose that is at the same time elegant, thoughtful, and vulnerable. I am just not sure that his application of these qualities are directed to their fullest potential in his first nonfiction monograph, Underground. The book splits its time between segmented travel writing and tales of beneath-the-crust adventure that never really dig deep enough to feel like we, as readers, are there along with him – either physically or imaginatively. The book flirts with urban exploration, with history, with religion, with philosophy, with architecture, with with with...but neither slakes a thirst for any of these subjects alone nor makes bold, reliable statements about the link between them that Hunt's 'cult of the underground' is credited with generating.

In short, Underground is much more of a personal memoir than a 'Human History' and does not quite cover what is suggested on the cover. It contains an inordinate amount of interspersed philosophical musings, breaking up the flow of the individual tales and collectively doing more to highlight Hunt's wide recall of other writers and poets than giving the reader valuable insights into the author's experiences. In trade for these, we receive not a single citation, which would be most welcome in a book of this nature.

Besides this, I am not wholly in accord with Hunt's tendency to wrap his mini-theses in pop-psychology, and I cannot help but wonder whether the divine peace that he claims we, as a species, universally feel underground is really any different to that of a good, uninterrupted stint in the shower when the innumerable distractions of our busy lives are all put aside for a few moments. I do my best thinking there, too.… (more)