John Haskell

Trying to Be

Francis Bacon the painter, Anthony Perkins the actor, and Ulrike Meinhof the terrorist are all part of it. As is Danny Kaye dancing with Gene Kelly, as is Jane Birkin, the briefly famous pop star, demonstrating how the human body understands itself. Using language that is both poetic and common, Haskell weaves together a narrative of philosophical connections, his narrator not impersonating the various characters but trying to see what they do to him, to feel what they do. And it turns out, constructing a life means deconstructing the imaginary biographies that create that life. When trying to learn how to dance like Yvonne Rainer, the post-modern choreographer, the emphasis is always on trying. The stories (which are also essays) attempt to shine some thought on the world we’ve been given, on the human body, on friendship, on history, on identify and family and love. And also, they’re meant to be read aloud.

The stories in John Haskell’s Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts—painting, film, dance—in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer—it doesn’t matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell’s narrators are porous, and it is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and forms the stories themselves. For what I most admire about Trying to Be is that the stories aren’t just thinking about visual art, film, and dance; they are coming together with them. It feels as though this book is as close to artmaking as it is to writing, that Haskell’s gaze is cast in different directions at the same time, that what happened when he wrote these stories is somehow still happening.

--Amina Cain, judge of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, and author of A Horse at Night