David Searcy's essay collection, Shame and Wonder, opens with a piece based on what he calls a "strange, opaque and mysterious tale" his dental hygienist shares with him about coyote attacks on her father's West Texas ranch. That characterization is an apt one for the 21 artfully crafted, if occasionally discursive, essays that compose this book.
Though Searcy's not shy about sharing slices of personal history, he often comes at them obliquely. A Texas native and resident of Dallas, Searcy, author of the novel Ordinary Horror, excels at capturing the peculiar character of his home state, where having a "look around is what there is to do out here." Over the course of the book, we learn that he grew up in the 1950s and "never lived very far from anywhere else I've lived." One of the most affecting pieces of memoir is the elegiac reminiscence "How to Color the Grass," in which he returns to his renovated elementary school and experiences again the "potent emptiness of childhood."
One of the most entertaining pieces in Shame and Wonder takes Searcy far from his Texas roots. "Santa in Anatolia" is the account of a trip to Turkey, sponsored by something called the Gülen Movement, with his girlfriend, Nancy. It's not unusual for one of David Searcy's essays to end up some distance from its starting point. But anyone willing to follow him on these meandering journeys will be rewarded with some fine writing and insights from the fertile mind of a careful observer whose thoughts might just strike their own sparks of memory and recognition for sympathetic readers. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer