Dan Dixon

Didion’s specific genius, once again on display in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, is that she orders her prose with such painstaking precision that one cannot help but glimpse the disorder roiling just beneath.

That there is no recovery for Blaine as such, that his subsequent path does not offer the pleasures of a neatly resolved narrative, becomes a way of considering broader cultural and political ills.

To closely examine a writing process is to make writing seem possible where it often seems impossible. The impossibility of writing is the impossibility of the apartment I live in, that I am writing these words in, part of a building that was decades ago conceived, designed, constructed. I cannot think of this building as anything but inevitable, whereas this analogy, as I write it, seems unstable, weak. I deleted and rewrote it several times, unsure of its quality. But as you read this paragraph, secured on the published page, even if you agree that it leaves something to be desired, you will still read it as if it had been sealed with lacquer, my hesitations smoothed away.

‘On a formal level, the book tells a story about writing as professional work, and how it can (or at least once could) happen in Australia with some success. It also wonders, both explicitly and through its form, what it means for literary writing to survive after what has, always unsatisfyingly, been called postmodernism.’

The sense that there exists a gap between language and the world is the theme to which Ben Lerner’s writing has most relentlessly returned.