Alive to the world
The first essay in Durga Chew-Bose’s “Too Much and Not the Mood” is a long one, about 100 pages with only section breaks, and it sets a tone for the rest of the collection. Titled “Heart Museum,” it starts with a riff on a particular emoji, one that is a “shell pink, tower-block building with blue windows.” The author believes it stands for cardiologist or heart hospital, but an online glossary calls it a love hotel.
The essay wends through tangents: how the heart never stops, infinity, wonder, life in miniature, the insignificance of the individual, writing, memory, versions of happiness, sisterhood, photography, “nook people,” ancestry and history. Often a series of paragraphs is built on what seems to be a stray observation. If you blink — skim or skip a sentence — you can lose your way.
By its end, however, the essay proves to be an extended meditation on the unnameable, about emotions for which there are no convenient descriptions, no emoji, no obvious signs or symbols. It’s a formidable and also sometimes exasperating essay — on the surface, the prose seems more accessible, but as with the Modernists or Montaigne, you have to work for the payoff.
The collection is composed of 14 essays of varying lengths, and many of the most insightful observations in it are about the difficulty of making language match up to lived reality. The most interesting pieces in the book consider language in conjunction with identity, sometimes the author’s Bengali Canadian identity, but more memorably the underexplored terrain of brownness as a racial identity. The author links small speech acts to larger ideas about how identity can affect one’s sense of belonging and social placement.
In “D as In,” the author discusses her name, Durga. Although her name is constantly mispronounced, she rarely corrects those who mispronounce it, saying it’s easier: “Easier in the totally yielding sense of the word, as if being impartial about and casually erasing my most essential self — my name — complies with an imaginary code ... that establishing room for everyone else is the quickest route to assimilation.”
The essay is a stunning examination of how intricately bound our names are with our identities, and how this might affect our sense of personal liberty. Later in the essay, she relates an incident in which a person approaches her to ask where she’s from, and before she can answer, her new friend asks, “Why would you ask her that?” In the moment, the author is taken aback by her friend’s response, a level of confrontation wholly unfamiliar to her. She writes, “her sharp takedown of this stranger seemed unjust to me. Briefly I thought, Poor guy. That is, until the next morning when I woke up feeling light and unburdened.”
In “Tan Lines,” Chew-Bose talks about a relatively common experience, a white person saying to a brown person: “I’m almost as brown as you. I’m darker than you now. We match . ... You look like you tan easily.” It might seem like an innocuous statement to the speaker, but it happens rather frequently, this calling attention to the other person’s skin color as “tan,” with white as a default and brown as something transient. In critical race theory, the kinds of incidents Chew-Bose describes in the essay would be dubbed microaggressions as a shorthand to discuss larger issues of justice. But the point for Chew-Bose is the effect of these tiny interactions on an individual psyche, and she mines the subterranean emotions beneath the surface of them with intimacy and beauty.
In what is a fairly radical gesture these days, the author often places her predilections above the reader’s ease. At times, the lack of hard structure coupled with free-floating lyricism feels self-indulgent. Chew-Bose almost certainly knows this. After all, the collection is titled after the final line in an entry from Virginia Woolf ’s “A Writer’s Diary” that states “too much and not the mood” — referring to how tired Woolf was of cramming into or cutting her writing to please other people.
A few essays do miss the mark. For example, the overly anecdotal “Gone!,” a narrative about a family friend that never arrives at a larger point. But like certain pieces in Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets” or Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” all of these essays offer a hiatus from a world that overvalues the logical, aggressive and extroverted.
When the world seems to be on fire, intuitive essays that focus on miniature aspects of the ordinary-everyday can serve as a balm. Chew-Bose turns all her associative musings into a melancholy selfportrait of the highest order. If sometimes maddeningly desultory, the intensity of ChewBose’s observations cut to the quick. Her sentences show tremendous promise, coming as close as language can to how it feels to be alive as a young woman, at a time in your life when every detail matters.