the author has always written close to the bone, and Dispatches from the Salon sharpens that instinct into something approaching grace.

An issue from the Hudson archive — essays, verse, and review of the season's most necessary books.

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

A Letter, Long Withheld

The dialogue is doing several jobs at once. It tells us where we are. It tells us who is listening. And, more rarely, it tells us what the silence between two people actually costs.

“What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity.”

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.

A Question of Form

The dialogue is doing several jobs at once. It tells us where we are. It tells us who is listening. And, more rarely, it tells us what the silence between two people actually costs.

Dispatches from the Salon is the kind of book that ends and then keeps ending — in conversations the next morning, in margins revisited a week later, in sentences that surface, unbidden, on long walks.