Abstract

Embracing Between the Bombs

This article discusses the book "Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise," by Paul Monette. This is not to say that many of the essays collected here are not intensely personal in both tenor and subject. But there's a wry joke behind the adverb in that "too personal," and it can not be explained by any of this. Inserted into the title of the mature and celebrated author's new book, that reference to the young writer's early rejections becomes a kind of literary last laugh. In a way, that insight has informed all of Monette's work, from the early poetry collections through the pre-AIDS novels and finally the output of the past decade, which Monette has elsewhere described as his way of recording, as if in one of the Greek inscriptions that so move him, just "how terrible was the calamity."