Can You Tolerate This?

April 9, 2018
Poet Young (Magnificent Moon) makes her nonfiction debut with this collection of probing, if sometimes pretentious, essays about growing up and becoming an adult. Refreshingly, she acknowledges that her own coming-of-age was far from unique, and the best selections are those in which Young takes some critical distance from herself. Her voice is more confident and her sentences more pointed in these pieces, such as an investigation of Japanese hikikomoris’ hermit lifestyles in “Sea of Trees.” “Witches,” about discovering the taboo of nudity as a child and becoming trapped within the accompanying body self-consciousness, takes on more resonance placed next to “Bones,” about a young boy becoming trapped in his own body by a rare bone disorder. However, Young’s autobiographical essays can still fall into the trap of faux-profound navel-gazing: “I was ashamed of myself, now, for asking so insistently what I could do with stories I only half understood. I stopped writing about Big Red and all I wanted it to symbolize,” she writes about her brother’s favorite jacket. It’s clear Young believes that, as she writes about the hikikomori, “immersion is the desired state” for self-discovery, but Young seems to learn the most about herself, and find the most to teach her readers, when she can immerse herself in a state that isn’t her own.

May 1, 2018
A debut collection of essays from Young (Creative Writing/Victoria Univ. of Wellington; Magnificent Moon, 2013), a poet and editor with Victoria University Press in New Zealand.The author has a clean, generally engaging writing style, though she has a tendency to meander. Important passages sometimes lack context, and several pieces would benefit from more background and fleshing out. Young's defining strengths are honesty, sharp observational skills, and sensitivity shorn of sentimentality. Most of these essays originally appeared in various New Zealand literary magazines and journals, and there are cultural references and colloquialisms that may puzzle some readers. Nor are all the entries essays in the strictest sense. Many read like short stories or rather eccentric reminiscences, especially "Big Red," a long account of a not-terribly-interesting family. The collection's better pieces--"Katherine Would Approve," "Sea of Trees," and "Wolf Man"--reflect on such concerns as memory, impermanence, self-consciousness, the nature of solitude, and the author's acute body awareness. Young is undeniably thoughtful, and she displays flair. She can arrest you with a glorious passage, a searching perception, or exquisitely apt metaphors and similes. But even some of her finer essays risk undercutting their potency with random endings, not so much open-ended as abrupt or flat. At the same time, the author reveals wisdom beyond her years and is a highly sympathetic figure. Young's verse has been praised for its "restrained exuberance," though such buoyancy is seldom on display here. The writing is measured and marked more by wistfulness and melancholy, though her curiosity and imagination are always engaged. Given the author's talent and depth of vision, readers can expect continued improvement in her nonfiction work.Young has said that her essays emerge from feelings of awkwardness about herself and her place in the world, but with this collection and those to follow, the world of this promising New Zealander is about to become wider.

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February 1, 2018

There's real in-house excitement about this new essay collection from New Zealand essayist/poet Young, and no wonder; Young was among the nonfiction winners of the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize, which has served wondrously to bring our attention to writers who ought to be better known. Young's essays use personal detail to wrestle with the larger coming-of-age issues of ambition and disappointment, so everyone should relate.

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