“Any Person Is the Only Self” is Gabbert’s seventh book, and although nothing about it is morbid, death shadows the text throughout. Of course, reflecting on Covid invites thoughts of mortality, but she also writes about her father-in-law’s passing, Sylvia Plath’s suicide and the recent trend of denouncing books by dead writers, as if it were “poor form to die.” (Gabbert, rightly, judges this both tacky and strange.)
But in literature, Gabbert finds not only life after death — she talks about the “metalife” of writing — but also a reason to live and engage with the world. “Any Person Is the Only Self” seems decidedly unlike the work of somebody who plans to retire from writing. Rather, it feels like an expression of gratitude for both the act of reading in itself and for reading as a route to conversation, a means of socializing, a way to connect.
In fact, the book’s more focused essays (one on Proust, one on time in “Frankenstein,” one on Leonora Carrington) suffer largely because they trade this social engagement for the hothouse air of graduate literature papers, which, too often, are written only in dialogue with assigned texts. Their tightness also calls attention to Gabbert’s penchant for stopping essays abruptly rather than coming to real conclusions. “I prefer books that seem a little wrong or unfinished or somehow unprovable,” she writes at one point. But that sentence appears in a book that sporadically offers plenty of proof for its ideas, by way of extensive quotations from “Swann’s Way” or “The Hearing Trumpet.” Intentional though it may be, the discrepancy feels jarring and inapt.
When Gabbert lets herself be thematically loose, however, her essays’ open endings admirably provoke more thought. So does their catholicity, their enthusiasm, their ability to link disparate topics. In “Party Lit,” which starts with “Gossip Girl” and ends with “Appointment in Samarra,” Gabbert replicates the random swirl of a good night out. In “Same River, Same Man,” she pulls off a dual ode to “Rabbit, Run” (an oft-denounced dead-man novel that I, like Gabbert, continue to venerate) and the 1991 thriller “Point Break.” And in “Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge,” another not-quite mission statement, she unites Rilke and home design, leaning heavily on writings by the architect Robert Venturi, who seeks “messy vitality,” “violent adjacencies” and “chaotic juxtapositions” in a building or street.
Had Gabbert allowed mess and chaos to dominate, “Any Person Is the Only Self” would have been a near-perfect collection. As it is, when she lets those elements come to the fore, her work sings.
