Avoid the Day

May 15, 2020
A creative writing professor's memoir about coming to terms with his father's impending death. With his father on his deathbed, Kirk couldn't bear to face the inevitable. They had a troubled relationship, and, as much as the author tried to distinguish himself from his minister father, who "only showed me how to put on the spectacle of holiness," he fears that they are too much the same. While his father had issues with alcohol, Kirk's own struggles were worse, with other substances intensifying the effects of the booze--and rendering him an unreliable narrator. The author also suspects that he, like his father, is something of a hypocrite, a charlatan at his own chosen altar of journalism. "It was almost as if I'd been suddenly deprogrammed from a faulty cult of my own making," he writes. "That cult having something to do with the rigors of my trade....I had developed an acute allergy to experience itself." Nevertheless, Kirk dove into a piece of long-form investigative journalism involving Hungarian composer B�la Bart�k and a missing musical manuscript. The author's quest took him from archives and a series of locations in his native Northeast to Transylvania, where the composer first heard the folk music that would subsequently inform his own work. All of this builds to a delirious vision of Kirk's father's being torn apart while, in fact, the Bart�k story seems to be deteriorating: "The trail has gone cold. I'll never know any more than this." His half-baked account subsequently finds him embarking on a wilder adventure to the Arctic Circle, toward the heart of darkness in the eternal sunlight, without much of an epiphany or resolution. While some readers may applaud the author's approach--essentially, writing around a topic that is difficult to explore--as audacious and psychologically harrowing, many will find the work required for the payoff to be too arduous. An ambitious, strange psychodrama for fans of chimerical nonfiction odysseys.

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June 22, 2020
Kirk (Kingdom Under Glass) casts about for some subject to distract himself as his father lies dying, in this uneven memoir. He lands on Béla Bartók (1881–1945), the Hungarian composer who wrote his Third String Quartet in nearby Waterbury, Vt. In peripatetic prose, Kirk devotes the first “movement” of his ragged narrative to his quest to reconstruct the story of the autograph manuscript of Bartók’s musical piece. Along the way, his travels take him to Transylvania and Philadelphia, Pa., in search of Otto Albrecht, the man who discovered the manuscript in a bank safe; the score now resides in the University of Pennsylvania’s Music Library. Here he shifts gears into his second movement, a quirky, seemingly tangential story of his trip to the Arctic Circle with his friends, where he avoids the guilt of knowing the relief he’ll feel when his father dies (“if only because I know how much easier it will be once there is only one of us around”). Kirk’s narrative disintegrates into an emotional swamp where one moment he’s obsessing over his hangovers and the next he’s getting misty-eyed over his father’s “yolky, barely animate eyes,” as he talks to his father via Skype. Kirk’s meandering memoir stalls in both of its movements, never quite connecting the themes.