Shame and Wonder: Essays

Hangdog dejection and unlikely epiphanies infuse these offbeat, beguiling essays by novelist Searcy (Last Things). He rattles around the Dallas hinterland (with an overseas excursion to Turkey’s St. Nick tourist circuit) and stumbles across oddball stories and subjects: a rancher who uses a recording of his crying baby daughter to lure a troublesome coyote within rifleshot; a giant boulder topped by a scraggly tree covered with pocketknife-carved hearts; the barely-remembered tragedy of a Jewish tightrope walker crushed in a fall in Corsicana, Tex., in 1884. Many pieces recall a sunlit Eisenhower-era boyhood filled with baseball, paper airplanes, woodland excursions with a homemade slingshot, and TV space operas. Others explore Searcy’s lifelong fascination with the emotional valence of hard science, which he indulges by repurposing the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, which tested the speed of light, as a symbol of the quest for meaning. Searcy’s writing is by sharp turns goofy, wry, and melancholy, tentative at times but always curious and superbly evocative. (An Internet pop-up sex ad “drops down like a rubber spider on a string. As clear and simple and alarming and imperative as schizophrenic voices probably are.”) His essays meander along wisps of metaphorical connection, leaping from tooth-flossing to 17th-century housing, from Zuni religious rituals to cereal box prizes, from his mother’s still-life painting to medieval Platonism. The result is a funny, haunting journey through mysterious enlightenments. Photos. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Jan.)