A Plea for Eros

Neither Here nor There

"My father once asked me if I knew where yonder was," writes Siri Hustvedt in the opening essay of A Plea for Eros (Picador; paperback, $15). "I said I thought yonder was another word for there. He smiled and said, 'No, yonder is between here and there.' " You can never get to yonder, Hustvedt, a novelist, points out: "What fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought."

In her new essay collection, Hustvedt roves from the three places that define her -- Minnesota (where she grew up), Norway (where her mother is from) and New York (where she lives now) -- to a film set, where she faints when she puts on a corset for the first time, to the other side of the gender line, where "sometimes in my dreams I'm a man." Through it all, she weaves her personal experiences and thoughtful criticism, including pieces on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens and Henry James. She remembers Sept. 11 -- she could see the towers from the windows of her Brooklyn home -- and how everything changed and then seemingly changed again back to normal. "Everyone was so nice after September 11, you remember that?" she overhears a woman say on the subway. "We were wonderful during the crisis, and we were tender to one another. . . . Strangers spoke to each other in the street, in stores, and on the subway. That need to ask, to tell, is over now. People have returned to the business of living their private lives."

In the title essay, she makes her plea for eros, "a plea that we not forget ambiguity and mystery, that in matters of the heart we acknowledge an abiding certainty. I honestly think that when we are possessed by erotic magic . . . we are living a story of exciting thresholds and irrational feeling. We are living in a secret place we make between us, a place where the real and unreal commingle." It is a place much closer than yonder.

-- Rachel Hartigan Shea