72395873289

LAWRENCE WESCHLER
Bookstores never know where to put Lawrence Weschler’s books. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder
(1995), his portrait of the curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is likely to be found in
“Psychedelics.” Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999), a profile of a performance artist who draws
images of money, in “Economics.” A Miracle, A Universe (1990), which examines the role of torture
in the military dictatorships of Brazil and Uruguay, may be in the “Latin America” section. That the
confusion stems as much from Weschler’s remarkable breadth as a writer as it does a bookstore’s
parochialism gives him little comfort.
Where does Weschler want his work collected? Calamities of Exile (1998), his book about three
expatriates from three totalitarian regimes—Czech dissident Jan Kavan, Iraqi architect Kanan
Makiya, and South African poet Breyten Breytenbach—offers a clue. The volume’s subtitle, Three
Nonfiction Novellas, is a designation (literature? journalism?) that simultaneously clarifies and
complicates the question of just what kind of writing he does. For his part, Weschler has settled on the
term “writerly nonfiction.”
This ambiguity goes to the heart of his work. Weschler is a storyteller—a master of narrative, no
matter the subject, or genre. “Every narrative voice—but especially every nonfiction voice—is itself
a fiction, and the world of writing and reading is divided between those who know this and those
who either don’t or else deny it,” begins the prospectus for “The Fiction of Nonfiction,” the course he
has taught at Princeton, Sarah Lawrence, and NYU. “Human beings have glands that secrete all sorts
of things. But the human mind secretes stories. We live narratives. That is the only way we know how
to experience anything, and it is our glory.”
Weschler’s characters tend to be marginal—not in their importance, but in the sense that they
provide him with an off-center perspective that enables him to tackle preposterously large subjects
(art, torture, the nature of money). His best characters are those whose narratives are interrupted
(whether by exile or chance), but whose passion and wonder are recharged by being destabilized. “In
all my writing, I guess, I have been concerned with people and places that were just moseying down
the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly and almost spontaneously they caught
on fire, they became obsessed, they became intensely focused and intensely alive—ending up, by
day’s end, somewhere altogether different from where they’d imagined they were setting out that
morning,” he writes in the introduction to A Wanderer in the Perfect City (1998).
Weschler was born on February 13, 1952, and raised in Van Nuys, California. His father was a
professor and industrial psychologist, and his grandparents were Viennese Jews who emigrated at the
beginning of the Second World War. Ernst Toch, Weschler’s grandfather, a composer, was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony in 1956.