Degas at the Gas Station: Essays

Tulane University English professor Beller (Lost in the Game) delivers a kaleidoscopic memoir-in-essays touching on themes of family, memory, and grief. He reflects on moments throughout his life both cataclysmic and mundane, from losing his dad, who had escaped the Holocaust, to cancer when he was nine to observing his young daughter wearing a tutu at a gas station, looking “like something Degas might paint if he went on a field trip to the Stop & Shop.” Beller unpacks emotions that would otherwise remain lost in time, like the sadness he sees in his boyhood self, coping with his grief by playing with his late father’s shaving cream. Along the way, he effectively demonstrates how his past shaped the person he became; in “Us and Them,” he describes how he sang songs in Hebrew with his mother and, now a parent himself, hopes his daughter will stay connected to her Jewish heritage. Beller’s lucid writing makes even the ordinary magical (“The music was propulsive, driving us at once into the future and the past. We were, in some way, traveling to both places together”). The result is a penetrating meditation on the human condition. (Nov.)