Portrait Inside My Head: Essays
Lopate, a zealous advocate for essays, introduces his newest “motley” collection with renewed appreciation for this “wonderfully fluid form,” this “literary testing ground of intellectual thought and psychological self-portraiture.” Lopate does the essay proud. He is elegant in style and a real slugger when it comes to content. Perhaps this mixture of grace and toughness was forged in his rough 1950s childhood, during which he contended with poverty, anti-Semitism, bullies, and his own shortcomings in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene, which he so vigorously chronicles in this ensnaring book’s most potent essays. Lopate is an ardent, shrewd urban chronicler, piquantly incisive in analyzing film and literature and unnervingly candid and combative in addressing intimate relationships, sexual performance, and his loving rivalry with his brother, Lenny, the well-known New York radio host. A voracious and exacting critic and passionate teacher (see his writer’s guide, To Show and to Tell) armed with caustic wit, “mistrust of transcendence,” and zest for provocation and self-exposure, Lopate confesses, “For it is only when writing that I begin to exist.” --Donna Seaman