He's known for dystopian works of fiction, so readers familiar with Jesse Ball (The Divers' Game) may be surprised by the whimsical nature of his memoir, Autoportrait. His approach is unconventional but not unprecedented. Ball admires French author Édouard Levé's Autoportrait, published in 2005 and written as a series of fragmentary observations. This approach to writing a biography, Ball writes, "lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life." So he attempts a similar feat in this continuous paragraph, over 100 pages long, of non sequiturs that whip back and forth between mundane observations and traumatic experiences. One moment, he mentions a middle-school classmate who killed himself. In the next sentence he writes of his childhood fear of "snakes, the dark, the depths of the cosmos" and then notes the time "my first wife went away." For every devastating revelation ("When I was in high school, I used to think constantly about whether I should unplug my brother from life support") there's a disarmingly wacky comment: "I can be coaxed into buying an unreasonable amount of cheese."
The whole book is such: lighthearted to sad and back again, a series of declarations made without elaboration. Depending upon one's view of human nature, readers will find this approach scattershot and superficial or provocative, messy and refreshingly honest. Whichever side one chooses, one can't deny its effectiveness. Autoportrait is a crazy quilt of a memoir, an assemblage of wildly different pieces that, when put together, present a distinctive patchwork of themes and emotions. Like a life. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer