A Year in Reading: Garth Greenwell
Three of the books that most moved me in 2022 were memoirs of art and education. ’s is a masterpiece, maybe my book of the year. It took me 20 pages or so to get used to its loose, associative, sometimes impressionistic style, with sudden leaps in time and figures drifting in and out unintroduced; once I did, I was entranced. Much of the book centers on , who was Pinckney’s teacher at Columbia and became a central figure in his life. The glimpses we get of 1970s American literary royalty—, , , —are delicious; equally wonderful are the portraits of Pinckney’sto . But the book’s centerpiece is Hardwick: her brilliance and generosity, her anxiety and imperiousness, her heavy drinking, matched glass for glass by her student. (Pinckney’s struggles with addiction are a subtle but constant undertow.) Very few books bring you so close to life, or convey so vividly the experience of being young and brilliant, surrounded by youth and brilliance, persecuted by “the panic of being.” What feels like a formal innovation is the way the past is constantly perforated with glimpses of the present. Pinckney shows us the scene of writing, often to excuse himself for failing to get up to check a fact, or to let in the voice of his partner, the poet . At one point, he tells us he has had to get up and leave the room, holding his head in shame at his past self. I can’t say how much I loved this book, or how deeply it moved me.
