In my review of The Glorious American Essay, I said I preferred personal essays that "show off the writer's style and temper of mind as they meditate on a subject the reader may not have considered before." The essays in Loitering are exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.
D'Ambrosio states his goal in the preface:
My instinctive and entirely private ambition was to capture the conflicted mind in motion, or, to borrow a phrase from Cioran, to represent failure on the move, so leaving a certain wrongness on the page was OK by me. The inevitable errors and imperfections made the trouble I encountered tactile, bringing the texture of experience into the story in a way that being cautious never could.
D'Ambrosio's "temper of mind" tends toward loneliness and a distrust of nostalgia. His essays encourage a generous interpretation of people's lives, a recognition that "we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions."
I found the first three essays astonishing and beautiful. The pieces are arranged thematically without any indication of the chronology, so I can't say where the first three fit in the development of the author's style. They are properly positioned at the front of the book, because their lingering mood influences what I notice in the subsequent pieces.
Something of an aside: Loitering is the second book by an author unknown to me that I discovered while browsing at Half Price Books in Dublin; the first was my favorite discovery of last year, The Island of Second Sight.
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