The Position of Spoons

Starred review from August 5, 2024
Novelist and playwright Levy (August Blue) delivers a dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more. The stylish essays—some as brief as one page—run the gamut from funny reflections on the Mona Lisa (“Her hair looks uncared for under her hood. She probably has lice”) and oral sex (“a super sport that should be included in the Olympic games”) to weightier considerations of the human tendency to look away from discomfort. Of model and photographer Lee Miller, whose career took her from fashion runways to documenting the liberation of Buchenwald, Levy writes, “she both hides from and gives herself to the camera.” Taken together, Levy’s extraordinary observations (eggs are “sculptures” that “have the added uncanny allure of being an artwork that is made inside the body of a hen”) amount to a trip through a consciousness trained to deeply consider everything it encounters—be it a pair of shoes, a bowl of lemons, or the work of Simone de Beauvoir. “There is the story and then there is everything else,” Levy posits. Here, she gives space to everything else, with sublime results. Readers will be grateful for this generous peek inside a singular mind. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.