THE BODY IS A TEMPORARY GATHERING PLACE

Bertaina’s collection of essays dances gracefully between offbeat humor and existential dread.

“The tea is never warm at these gatherings of porcelain dolls and stuffed bears named Apples,” writes Bertaina of his daughter’s imaginary tea parties in “A Field of White.” Concise and funny, this early story nicely lays out some of this collection’s recurring themes: childhood, parenthood, art and its effects, and a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with just about everything. The essays flow easily in the first section of this offering; they‘re full of stray observations and wry humor, but there’s something darker and existentially troubling in his sharp turns of phrase. Car rides tend to generate thoughts about the specter of death, and, while watching his children, he can’t help but reflect on how “the difference between breathing and not breathing feels so slim when we are young.” In “Time Passes: On Unfinished Things,” the author explores time itself—not in terms of quantum mechanics, but rather in terms of how one wastes it on sports, video games, or reflections on religion. The second section brings a bit more structure to Bertaina’s diverging thoughts with subsections in “On Trains” that address childhood, weddings, Europe, and relativity. The subsequent “On Eating Animals” allows him to explore some of his darkest and most absurd ideas as he imagines a father who’s roasted the family pet: “Dog is meat like any other….You have not done a terrible thing. You have just done a thing amongst many other things.” A sense of melancholy and doom returns in the standout essays “On Being 35” and “On Showering and Mortality,” before Bertaina faces down an existential crisis head-on, comparing himself to Mad Men’s lost and lonely Don Draper as he comes to the realization that “adult life was a sham.”

Some readers of this collection may feel that Bertaina’s essays are unstructured; one only gets vague impressions of the narrative of his life in references to travels in Europe, a divorce, and a move from California to Washington, D.C. However, the works all circle back to his primary themes and deliver one stunning moment after another. His impressive range allows him to easily land caustic jokes about despising people who reference California’s “dry heat” while also producing grand, poetic moments reflected in the collection’s title: “I want the quiet compression of things before there was any space,” he writes, “before there was any time, only these billions and billions of moments, unborn.” Whether his musings are melodious or detached, Bertaina is most impressive when writing about youth and parenthood. Again and again, he returns to how his kids allow him to tap into moments of humor, absurdity, and profundity. In “Home Burial,” for example, Bertaina watches his children tear around his apartment with abandon and feels the powerful force that they exert on him: “so radically have they altered the shape of my days, the contours of my self.”

A rambling but funny and moving set of works with impressive range and depth.