Title: A Plea for Eros Author: Siri Hustvedt Publisher: Picador Publish Date: 2006 Pages: 228 Genres:: Literature,Reviewer: Jerome D'Angelo

Rating:

Writer’s often write about what they know. Familiarity of subject matter and character makes for a much smoother transition from thought to page, and it also gives the writer the ability to put a little bit of themselves into their project. The ability to step outside the boundaries of what is familiar, however, is the mark of the truly talented scribe. Writing from different perspectives can not only be arduous and difficult, but also requires greater concentration and patience from the writer. When done well, the results are all the more satisfying to the writer, and the work all the more enjoyable to the reader.

And then there are books like A Plea For Eros.

Author Siri Hustvedt’s book, a collection of essays written by her from 1995 up until 2004, explores what would otherwise be some very interesting subject matter. Hustvedt, a middle-aged Brooklynite by way of Minnesota with Norwegian ancestry, describes a variety of topics throughout the 12 essays that make up A Plea For Eros. Among them are erotic courtship, cross dressing, the joys of wearing a corset, 9/11, and also her experiences growing up in Minnesota, coming to New York City and the culture shock thereof while remembering time spent in her parent’s homeland of Norway. Such a broad spectrum of topics and spheres of influence would have been, in the hands of an author capable of putting them together in a more coherent manner, quite an intriguing read.

Hustvedt falls well short of this. Most of the problem is, simply put, her writing style. Evidence of this presents itself in the very first essay “Yonder.” Hustvedt describes how, in a conversation with her father, he tells her the word yonder “is between here and there.” That statement proves to be somewhat prophetic, as it seems Hustvedt’s point is neither here nor there. She continues on for the next 40-odd pages about her parents, Norway, New York, her friends, her daughter and her husband, the paragraphs strung together about as loosely as the corset of the young woman depicted on the book’s cover art, her conclusion being, and this is a guess because it’s difficult to tell exactly, that “The page can resurrect what’s lost and what’s dead, what’s not there anymore and what was never there.”

Hustvedt does recover somewhat from a dry opening with the book’s essay by the same name. Here, Hustvedt discusses the thresholds necessary, as she sees it, to build eroticism. She makes her case for the ways in which social convention has changed erotic pursuit, and this would have made for an excellent read, if she would have offered a bit more support for it. Hustvedt draws mostly upon her own life as evidence of this. She also makes some claims that may make the very audience she’s trying to reach cringe. “American feminism has always had a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth.”

As to that aforementioned loosely tied corset, Hustvedt recalls during one essay her time on a film set with her daughter where the bit character she played was wearing a corset. A woman her age wearing a corset for the first time and describing the fun she had with it sounds appealing, but again, it’s done with little gusto. Hustvedt’s very next essay “Being A Man” deals with the sexual disembodiment of her dreams, where she portrays both males and females. Again, interesting subject, but not greatly conveyed.

 A Plea For Eros shows flashes of intriguing poetry and subject matter, but ultimately reads like one big journal entry. It seems appropriate to plead of the author herself for eros, as little of it actually presents itself here. Hustvedt’s analyses would have been better taken had they perhaps been better constructed.