Eastover
Review by Walter Cummins
The nine essays in Keizer’s collection perhaps may be divided into three categories—character studies of individuals close to the author, a report on his religious development, and considerations of complex issues leading to illuminating insights. The character studies are mundane, that on the stages of his religious development interesting, and those on deeper issues exceptional. His sentences match these differing approaches.
The essays about people—particularly Keizer’s grandmother and father-in-law—are essentially character sketches, filled with detailed examples of their behavior, including idiosyncrasies that add up to convincing portraits of why Keizer liked them so much and why they played important roles in his life. What he doesn’t do is use their lives as starting points for delving into their significance for human behavior.
The language in these essays is straight forward, lucid and specific, but expository at the root. Here’s a sentence from “Florence of Paterson”: “She continued to go to Paterson, as did her friend Pheobe and another old lady whose name I forget.” What’s provided is information rather than animation. He tells about things that happened without exploring how such events relate to broader human matters,
Compare that with words from “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” a very imaginative linking of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On,” the impact of Motown and its stars on American music, and racial struggles of the nineteen sixties. Here the writing takes on an energy to match the richness of his thinking. Even the essay’s title conveys the drama of a human experience, as does this sentence: “Even more than love—if it is possible to say ‘more than love’—Motown music spoke to me of longing, a longing sexual in expression but never entirely sexual in scope.”
It’s as if the inventive relationships of Keizer’s linking of Motown to a musical force, a major social change, and emotional responses inspires the energy of the phrasing with which he presents his connection to his subject. Keizer also integrates examples of his personal experiences that demonstrate the impact of ‘what’s going on” on his teenage life, such as working in a glue factory with a group of black men and being at high school dances where friends felt the Temptations were “not black enough.” In the essay Keizer illuminates a period of American history by making it personal, revealing how his personal life reflects the forces around him.
In “Grub,” he connects his experiences of grocery shopping at various outlets over the years with a consideration of the economic and sociological ramifications of such buying, including an analogy with pornography. He also brings in Karl Marx, Tennessee Williams, and Terry Eagleton. This is the wittiest of the essays, Keizer having fun with his subject: “What the less depressed of us want, and some depressed people want it also, is a clean place with muted lighting and a few undusted corners, deep colors, a medieval chapel, a rainy day study, ye olde English pub.”
Another essay in the collection with especially thoughtful insights is “World Enough and Time”—echoing Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” Its carpe diem urgency explores the relationships of very different people to what Keizer hopes to understand about his own life and all our lives. An epigraph by Samuel Johnson sets the tone. A man who is one of Keizer’s heroes makes a declaration about what he would choose if he had no duties or concerns about futurity; that is, spending his life riding briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
That leads Keizer into a developing train of thought that brings in, among others, Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac, Montaigne, Lou Reed, St. Augustine, Roy Orbison, and Albert Camus. How should we regard duties and concerns about futurity, including death and a possible eternity? Much pondering leads him to accept that the finality of Marvell’s time’s winged chariot is our fate instead of a brisk post-chaise. He gives the conclusion he would share with Dr. Johnson: “The pretty woman who completes your sentence also undoes it, because you cannot have her in your post-chaise without the risk of duty and futurity, the twin liabilities of love, which itself is a liability, as well as the only reason under heaven that any sane person ever had for wanting a life after death and before death either.”
In the collection’s best essays, like “World Enough and Time,” when Keizer opens his mind to exploration, he shows himself to be an original thinker and writer, fascinated by the meaning of a silk strike in 1913, a concert by Leonard Cohen, and other disparate topics. When reading the essays that grow from these subjects, it’s a pleasure to follow Keizer’s thoughtful illuminations and the surprises they yield.
