Trying at Life: A Review of Andrew Bertaina’s The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place

At some point in the writing careers of most contemporary essayists, they succumb to the inevitable, irresistible urge to recite the etymology of the word essai. From Old French. Meaning to attempt. To try.

Essayist Andrew Bertaina is no exception. Approximately two-thirds through The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place, his recent debut collection of 16 delightfully discursive essays, he acknowledges the common knowledge: “Everyone knows that the origin of the word essai is attempt,” he writes.

Yet 100 pages earlier, in his first oblique reference to essaying, the attempts that he documents encompass far more than trying to write. He is trying, also, at life. “But I try,” he says. “I try and I try. I wake early and pour cereal and give baths…But none of it matters because soon enough I’ll be annoyed about defiance, about the pooping, all the goddamn pooping, about the lack of precision in my writing about a caffeine-infused Saturday morning.”

Here is life in its everyday mundanity—making breakfast for the kids and waiting for a doctor’s appointment and shopping for groceries and watching TV, all interrupting an often-thwarted desire for intellectual transcendence, shadowed by a persistent questioning of whether the details of such an ordinary life even matter at all. “I am a rather insignificant creature,” Bertaina admits. He has “checked the boxes of a good American life”—a typical formula he defines as marriage, two children, and home ownership in the nation’s capital—and he has just disrupted it all with yet another ordinary American rite of passage: divorce.

But Bertaina’s book is not a mere chronicle of one man’s clichéd mid-life crisis; it is instead a profound interrogation of a crisis of faith, an existential unmooring after abandoning the devout Catholicism of his first three decades. As he approaches 40, Bertaina is attempting some kind of replacement for the grand certainty and meaning of a now-absent God. “In the middle of life’s road, I found myself in a dark wood,” he writes, invoking Dante’s circling through hell. Whatever the topic of any particular essay—whether the terse opening piece about a small plane crash, the meditation on death during a long road trip, the corresponding investigation into burial practices, the associative rumination on passenger trains and wedding trains and trains of thought, the nostalgic reflection on first kisses, the two parallel pieces on showers and baths, or the multiple passages on parenting and divorce—Bertaina’s essays are all about the meaning of life. Without God, is it just a long, tired to-do list of school lunches (sour milk, snap peas) and library book renewals?

“I have a lot of suffering ahead,” he prophesies in the opening essay. His are small sufferings, though, middle-class catastrophes, and Bertaina knows his circumstances are “kinder and gentler” than many others  He also knows that he alone is the architect of his current melancholy, exhibiting an admirable self-awareness concerning his choices and shortcomings, yet he cannot resist the desire to sink into the bath and “sit in lavish silence and brood, ungratefully, on what life has brought to me.” He laments the narrowing of possibility that comes with the narrowing of years. He confesses an almost obsessive need for persistent novelty and constant human interaction.  He despairs: “Is it plausible that my life is a waste of time?” he asks. “What am I … besides skin stretched taut over bones? … Am I unhappy? Aren’t we all?” After all these existential questions, an impatient reader may feel the urge to take Bertaina’s hand and guide him gently to the soft cushions of a therapist’s sofa. Yet, perhaps writing itself is a kind of psychic remedy. These pages are like his own therapy session notes, recording his agile, inquiring mind as it puzzles out “the riddle of living.”

Central to that riddle are the responsibilities of fatherhood. Bertaina’s ambivalence about parenting (“all the goddamn pooping”) wafts throughout the collection, vacillating between tender love (“adoring the warmth coming from their small, energetic bodies, pressed against my shoulder”) and sharp distaste (bemoaning the redundancy of a children’s game that leaves him “bored shitless”). But he does not simply confess guilt and try to sin no more; he instead seeks to understand the complexity of his feelings with openness and curiosity, pondering the cyclical generational patterns inherited from his own somewhat absent father and wondering aloud whether other parents experience this same mind-numbing apathy. “Having children was not an easy decision; nor has it been easy to care for them,” he admits. With such remarkable honesty, Bertaina’s unique perspective on fatherhood is a powerful addition to the candid accounts of motherhood in memoirs like Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work or novels like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch or Elisa Albert’s After Birth.

Parenting is not Bertaina’s only preoccupation here, however. Despite the tidy coherence implied in the straightforward essay titles (half of which are formulated after the signature style of the father of the modern essai himself, Montaigne, with designations such as “On Trains” or “On Eating Animals” or “On Unfinished Things”), Bertaina’s eye is constantly roaming, shifting, meandering, pausing, returning. Though he claims to find repetition deadening, his musings return again and again to the themes of death, divorce, parenting, travel, writing, religion, and meaning. Yet, with each recurrence, a new detail or perspective recasts the familiar landmarks in a different, ever-changing light. He maintains a careful pace, never lingering too long in one place, yet also allocating to each existential question the appropriate amount of pondering.

These essays are not predictable; they bend and loop and expand like a sunlit path through Dante’s dark woods. One word can change the course: The adverb briefly in a description of a shaky romantic relationship takes Bertaina away from the essay’s stated subject of uncertainty and into a poignant contemplation of the human lifespan’s brevity. In an essay on time, a brief mention of his religious upbringing turns into a long, perceptive analysis of time compression in the Bible. “But I digress, as I often do,” he jokes at one point. Yet he is serious when he states what could be taken as the book’s thesis, which contradicts an old writing professor’s insistence that “an essay can only be about one thing.” No, Bertaina argues, “[L]ife, isn’t ever about one thing.” Ergo: “An essay can only be about everything,” he asserts in his essay titled, of course, “This Essay Is About Everything.” It is perhaps the book’s best example of his self-proclaimed “near erotic delight” in digression—a pleasure the reader cannot help but also feel.  

If the reader is also a writer, then even more delights await. The process of writing in general—and writing these pieces in particular—remains a consistent meta-topic throughout the essays, which possess a kind of self-awareness. They bow to a long tradition of Western thinkers, dialoguing with formidable minds including Virginia Woolf and Wittgenstein, Herman Melville and Michelangelo, Leo Tolstoy and Thoreau, Zadie Smith and Socrates. Yet, Bertaina’s own essays sometimes refuse to conform to the lofty ideas and ideals that inspire them: “I was hoping to write an essay about love and home, or women and home,” Bertaina writes at one point, “And yet, I find myself fumbling to write about any of them.” Or, sometimes the right descriptors refuse to materialize: “‘bird-like’ is a silly way to describe a bird in the vehicle of prose,” Bertaina chastises himself over a lazy previous sentence.

As he, vulnerably, exposes his craft failings, he achieves far more stylistic triumphs. His humor charms at the highest and lowest registers—an inside-literature joke about Anna Karenina contrasts with a witty quip that “this essay, see line one, is pro piss.” His judicious similes arrest, and his careful attention to nature invites the reader to pause and find significance in two gnats, a single ant on a blade of grass, or a long encounter with a fly trapped inside an apartment. By holding these commonplace details with such care, Bertaina’s prose can inspire both readers and writers to recognize the profundity in their own everyday and to make something beautiful of the ordinary moments of life.

In fact, reading this collection might itself be one of those beautiful ordinary moments, like a conversation with a friend on the back porch in the summer dusk, a glass of chilled wine, everything right in the world. In this safe suspension, with a companion so kind and funny and open and self-aware, perhaps the conversation can venture into the darkest, scariest questions of life in a dialogue that always somehow stays light, with the beauty of life glittering like individual string lights overhead. Maybe then, the answer to the riddle of life arrives in—and as—the present moment. “[I]f all we have is the here and now,” Bertaina posits, “why not expand the details, imbue the ordinary life with rich sensory detail,” he says. “Life is dear: Hold it,” he tells himself at the end, trying and attempting—and succeeding—to tell us all.

The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place by Andrew Bertaina

Autofocus Books, May 2024, 173 pages, $20, paperback