A Piece Torn Out: On Jeff Sharlet’s “This Brilliant Darkness”
By: Jason Bruner
Tags: Book Review, Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction

Jeff Sharlet This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. New York: Norton and Company, 2020.

Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness began on Instagram, with a square for an image and only so much text. It began on Instagram because where does one find a place for another kind of thing? Not the combination of words and text, in themselves (that’s been done since there were photographs), but of a shift: in an approach, a career, a life.

I remember reading about Mary Mazur several years ago, shortly after Jeff got to know her, leaned in, took a breath, and made me love her, free as a fish in the aisles of Wal-Mart, midnight, her $50 government gift card a ticket to possibilities undetermined. And his summary: “Here — with a thousand constraints — she sets the terms.” I’m not one to gush over “the sentence,” but I know when a sentence changes me. Not in an altar-call-come-to-Jesus sort of way, but just in the way that you might assume that a thing, once you return to it often enough, has probably changed you. Why? and To what ends? are still as mysterious to me as the moon.

Mary spent her $50 government gift card on an aquarium and 10 fish, which all died because she couldn’t afford the food. She kept them anyways. And those fish — the colors! — slowly warmed to room temperature, just like the frozen seafood she allows to slowly thaw in her bathtub until it’s soft enough to eat. You see, she’d gone in search of a microwave, but the colors! There are things more precious than hot food.

This Brilliant Darkness is a knowing heir to Walker Evans’ and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1938). These are books that stare, unflinchingly, into misery — the wretched churn — and make something beautiful of another’s suffering. They are, moreover, both books of the night: Sharlet, pecking at a laptop after midnight at a local Dunkin Donuts; Agee, furiously scribbling his Alabama fever dream until dawn, his Southern princely elegance revealing itself as desperation strung together with semicolons endless as stars buckling the darkness together page on page world without end amen.

Agee (Agee tells us and then tells us again) was consumed with his incapacity to tell the story, the full story, the totality of the awfulness of the Alabama sharecroppers’ lives, the impossibility of conveying the simultaneity of it all, the malarial water, putrid in the morning, and her face — that face he imagined lying next to him after the orgy, in bed, that thin mattress and the lice — and their rags and the sum of their nothing at all and how the water was still rancid after the cotton sacks bent their backs and the smells were thick like air; but all he had was one word after another and he was only there for part of a summer, after all, and can you imagine it is like this month on month, year on year on year, life on life and the water was rancid and the mud and the lice and the cold and a semicolon;

Agee’s book might be called a failure on its own terms; it’s too consumed with the constraints of the premise of a book itself. Not so with Sharlet. Sharlet gives us only the duration of a snapshot: metaphorically, literally. Often one photograph and a few hundred words — a glimpse/exchange/response. Sharlet isn’t consumed by the partiality. That partiality — the frame, the moment — only exists because something was shared. Until we get more: Charley “Africa” Keunang, killed by the LAPD on Skid Row. We get some 60 pages and, like Agee, know that it’s hardly enough. Still, I want Agee to hear the painful grace of Sharlet’s words: “… and there’s nothing we can do now about the choices that aren’t offered.” This, too, is the terror of the utter ordinariness of another’s life — or their suffering, and is there a difference? Not between life and suffering but between their suffering and my own?

Agee seems not to contemplate this question. He would never be a sharecropper, but he wants you to not look away, to see the ordinary awfulness that can’t be his. The lives and stories in This Brilliant Darkness are closer, the possibility nearer at hand. A former nurse now working a night shift at Dunkin Donuts in order to raise her child during the day; a vet: gentle, shriveled. Because Sharlet eventually lets it slip: his daughter. And I get it: my own daughters; my son. This world of glass. “It could be yours. It’s mine.”

Those who know Sharlet’s other books (The Family; Sweet Heaven When I Die; Radiant Truths) will find moments that feel familiar. The long-form pieces on Russia and Mary Mazur might already be familiar. But I found his style here to be new by comparison. Gone, for the most part, are the lucid descriptive metaphors (i.e., of Doc Boggs’ singing like “a thick-necked tomcat with a broken paw”). And while some passages reflect the shimmer of Agee’s brilliance — “the clutter of our thin plane, the emptiness above,” this is a terse book; the glimpses are heavy enough.

Upon reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I felt I knew no one in the book so well as I knew Agee. But Sharlet can make me fall in love with any stranger, and he’s generally not a writer preoccupied with himself. He does this only with glimpses, revelations. And yet: the suffering is not equivalent (Sharlet’s and the people he introduces us to), nor does it pretend to be, though it doesn’t always make that fact visible. And yet: there is real pain, his own, here: heart attack, death, loss, fear. Nothing extraordinary, mind you, just the stuff that fills the world. In this sense, Sharlet doesn’t follow Susan Sontag’s rather dim estimation that there is nothing we can know of another’s suffering. Instead, he insists that there is empathy, the imagination that it could — and often should — be otherwise. For him. For them, regardless.

Agee tells that he doesn’t want to write, that he only wants Evans’ pictures. And yet: my copy of his book is 471 pages of text. He says that the pictures are more honest. And yet: he tells us about the production, the manufacturing, of how Evans took those pictures as Agee sat awkwardly in the shade of the Alabama summer, the family waiting for the shadows of their raggedness to be captured. I think Agee realizes, in the end, that pictures won’t do, really, because photographs are too static: focused, cropped, selected, ordered; in other words: contingent, partial, framed. What he wants to give us is visceral: “A piece of the body torn out by the roots.” The terseness of Sharlet’s work shows that he took Agee’s advice to heart.

Also by contrast, Sharlet claims no particular artistic merit to his photographs, which were snapped with his cell phone. He seems less burdened by his assumptions about what a photograph is than was Agee before him. Sharlet doesn’t use his images for what Dennis Tedlock calls “photo-writing” (An Archaeology of Architecture); and his isn’t the elliptical lyricism of Teju Cole’s Blind Spot. Instead, Sharlet’s pictures do what they need to do, which is nothing more than to be what they are: evidence of darkness, yes, but also of the eternal semicolons holding it all together.