"Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes"

[fiefoe]

The articles or 'feuilletons' are usually less than five pages long, but they feel, for lack of a better word, spacious. Maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the best miniature works.

The first piece, "A Book for the Depressed" is Anatole Broyard at his most self-amused. It's about two guys showing off their feathers in front of a lovely woman in a bookstore ('The woman ran her fingers over the shelf in a delicate arpeggio. She fluttered on foot in a pas de cheval.') -- and such fine, cultured feathers!

• "He may prefer," I said, "to have his depression recognized, shared, enunciated - even enhanced." <...> "It is conceivable," I continued, "that depression is an irreducible part of the dignity of man. The poetry is in the pity."
• "Valery," I said, "compared the poet to a man who assembles an enormous machine, piece by piece, on a roof, only to shove it down on the head of  the unsuspecting pedestrian."
• Burt: "Why do we wrap the lady in our raw breath?"
• "Be of live a little more careful," Burt read, "than of everything..." <> "A decent sentiment," I said. "Yet it may be this very necessity for carefulness that has depressed the lady's friend."
  

Broyard deploys phrases that seem paradoxical at first glance to great effect -- 'an expression of energetic patience', 'a wistful jauntiness... from New Orleans'. He himself, can be best described as guardedly honest. From "The Man Who Danced on Broadway" and "Love as a Weekend Guest" respectively:

• Especially when he was walking away, there was a kind of jazz in my father's movements, a rhythm compounded of economy and flourishes, functional and decorative.
• Once, when I was six or seven, before my novelty wore off, my father took me...
• I... reflect that married women have quiet mouths.
• Still, isn't it nice not to have to take your past, present and future in your arms? To act out a little pantomime of freedom, or of irresponsibility?
• When children grow up, they never feel that they have played enough.