“A boy stands at the crossroads, considers his limited options.” The opening line of Brian Dillon’s memoir, “Ambivalence: An Education,” maps a juncture familiar to many. As a teen-ager in Ireland in the nineteen-eighties, Dillon toggled between constant states of panic and boredom, hoping to avoid the strictures of a conventional life style and, consequently, the moribund, mainstream tastes that come with it. A precocious reader and thinker, the young Dillon grows enamored with the radical possibilities of style. He’s not just a fan of David Bowie; he thinks of Bowie as an orientation, a world view. Yet he is bedevilled by insecurity, easily undone when mocked by schoolmates for his geeky devotions to the pop charts or science fiction. He’s in for a solitary journey, toward “the promise of escape, the promise of promise itself.”
The overheated circuits of teen-age life are well-worn ground for a coming-of-age story, yet Dillon’s approach is anything but. The writer and editor has become known for a kind of memoir-inflected approach to criticism, publishing a series of entrancing books that are as much about questions of form and technique as they are about art’s power to move and transform. In recent works such as “Suppose a Sentence” (an examination of twenty-seven perfect sentences) or “Essayism” (a free-associative attempt to tease, stretch, and swerve around the boundaries of essay-writing), Dillon wanders through his shelves, scrutinizing works by Walter Benjamin, Joan Didion, or James Baldwin and seeing, at a granular level, how writing achieves such profound effects. “Ambivalence” isn’t a how-I-did-it prehistory of his career, as it ends well before he published anything of note. Rather, he writes about this formative span of his late teens and early twenties in the third person, investigating the passions and neuroses of young “B” from a distance. Few people intervene on B’s trajectory, if you can call it that; he spends most of his days dreaming and turning newly discovered ideas over in his mind until they feel like his own. Trauma and tragedies—such as the death of his parents, or periods of estrangement from his siblings—receive less scrutiny than the emotions unlocked by Virginia Woolf or Roland Barthes. The result is a strange, bewitching experiment in autobiography, in which there are no friendships or love affairs, just exquisite digressions on life-changing texts.
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Memoirs rely on a balance of the singular and the universal. We are curious about the idiosyncrasies of another’s life, but they can’t be so idiosyncratic that the reader finds their passions or motives wholly unrelatable. The all-knowing first person can suggest that a memoirist has already made sense of everything before sitting down to write: all the details and detours have been assimilated into a single, overarching story. Yet this isn’t how life feels in the moment, and Dillon attempts to capture the texture of a stretch of youth where nothing seems to be happening quickly enough. Viewing B as a kind of specimen allows the teen-ager to meander and fumble of his own volition, free of the adult’s earned wisdoms. He only understands the feeling of need, as is the self-obsessive wont of the teen. But B hasn’t yet figured out how to put any of these desires into language. Even years later, it’s as though the brooding young man can’t truly be known.
There is a rough narrative shape here, with the account beginning shortly after the death of Dillon’s mother and ending as he moves to England to pursue his graduate studies. He was a bright child but never an academic superstar—not that he was motivated, per se, by status or career. B goes through the motions of his life in clipped fragments of prose, as if to mimic the raw intensities that drive him. But occasionally Dillon steps in and muses about the broader contexts just out of focus to the young. Having failed to get into college, B enrolls at a school for “disappointed university applicants” to pass the time before reapplication. B feels that his dreams might be vanishing, yet Dillon reminds us that he is still too young to surrender them:
The first-person insights of memoir serve epiphany and discovery, as though all confessions are truthful. The distance of third person makes these moments of reflection more meaningful, as though part of the book’s journey is young B’s discovery of a language that might capture how he feels inside. Occasionally, Dillon writes in the second person, addressing B directly but also universalizing the young man’s plight. “Always on your mind is the prospect of wasting your life, which means doing what you are told and doing it poorly, but well enough to find, in time, a job and a station in life that will blight all ambitions and all attachments to art, language, thought, desire.” These are moments for us to wander into the text and measure ourselves against his fire.
“Ambivalence” is set between 1986 and 1995, a time when Dillon was “always imagining how things will be in about six months’ time: how he will dress, how he will speak and move in the world, what adjustments he will have made to his character and how he will be understood by others—perhaps even loved.” There were other important people in his life during this span—a path-changing academic mentor, a torturous sibling, his father—but the engine of “Ambivalence” is his personal syllabus. He reads Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and, as he falls into the text’s dizzying similes and metaphors, he grows infatuated with the “richness of substitution, conjuring one thing out of another, proving all things subtly or strangely not themselves. This is also that.” Descriptions of lovers or of his best friend, “S,” feel hazy and thin, yet he ponders at length about what passage from the book he wants read aloud at his funeral, rather than who will be in attendance.
All criticism is autobiographical, in the sense that it clues a reader in to the touchstones or influences that make a given critic’s taste unique. Dillon’s unusual approach throughout “Ambivalence” slowly comes into focus when B becomes hypnotized by the tenets of postmodernity, such as the mutability of the self, or the impossibility of fixed truths: if we are always works in progress, rather than stable selves awaiting discovery, then the most truthful account of one’s life would be one that denies discrete turning points or the grand illusion of ever being fully formed. Dillon’s fondness for italicized phrases and his occasionally grave tone are all part of a performance, something that he has learned from reading French theory. The very look of Barthes’s and Derrida’s writings inspires a way of living, “a dream of italicizing everything, inflecting every utterance, making language and life lean away from the solid, upright and reasonable. Obliquity is everything.”
B grows fixated on the “subjective, vulnerable, unmastered” style of Barthes, as the French thinker’s approach to essay writing “splintered” into something messy and strange, working through evocation and juxtaposition rather than persuasion. The closest “Ambivalence” comes to breakthrough is when B realizes that writing is where you figure these things out, even if the resulting essay is shaggy and abstruse. At one point, he is comfortably settled in graduate school, measuring his perception of self against how he seems to others. “Later he will learn that some of his fellow postgraduate students think he is pretentious, and he will feel amused, gratified, properly seen at last.” He wonders if he could ever fall in love with someone who does not read Derrida. Probably not.
For many years, I taught a writing workshop on cultural criticism that began with students composing a taste biography. What were the pivotal encounters that shaped their sense of what art could be and how it might affect them? Was it always love at first sight? We talked about the difference between merely liking a film and allowing it to transform you, the aspirations we might have to one day understand something we currently find difficult or unruly.
I still believe that the songs or books we love contain blueprints for how we hope to live, and Dillon’s memoir embodies how these personal canons inflect the way we understand and express ourselves. B fears being outed as a poseur, meekly copying the outline of some micro clique, rather than a true aesthete “driven only by curiosity and love.” Fifty pages in, the author observes that he has “not yet, in any meaningful sense of the verbs, begun to read—or write.”
You’ll drift in and out of “Ambivalence,” and muse on your own formative inputs. As I turned the pages, wondering whether any of B’s quandaries would be resolved, the book reminded me of how much of youth is spent pondering time, waiting, ready for the world beyond and yet slightly terrified of what’s actually out there. It’s an ode to a kind of boredom that feels desperate, endless, and, in retrospect, luxurious.
I’m about a decade younger than Dillon, and I recognized his desire to hoard and paw at any morsel connecting his small world to an alternative culture somewhere out there. As a child of the nineties, I at least had the benefit of cable television and the early days of dial-up internet. But I’m closer in age to Dillon than to those currently in their teens and early twenties; I wonder if Dillon’s dream of accumulation (of books, songs, ideas, anything), redolent of the eighties and nineties, still holds in an age of far too much. Do people still have the spare hours to linger and obsess over the meaning of taste, when the internet delivers us an endless stream of ready-made new poses? “Ambivalence” is a story of solitude, patience, and faith—qualities that contemporary culture seems to militate against. One of my favorite moments comes when an excited classmate emerges from the library holding a new book of feminist literary theory. “I have no fucking clue what it’s about,” B’s friend says, “but it’s brilliant.” There’s still time to figure out what it all means. ♦