Hua Hsu reviews Brian Dillon’s Ambivalence: An Education, a memoir that narrates its author’s late teens and early twenties — Ireland in the late 1980s, graduate study in England by 1995 — in the third person. The younger self is “B,” examined at a distance, as a specimen. Few people intervene in his trajectory; he mostly dreams and turns newly discovered ideas over until they feel like his own.

The formal choice is the argument. First-person memoir implies the writer has already made sense of everything before sitting down to write; third person lets the teenager meander and fumble, without the adult’s earned wisdom.

  • Trauma and deaths (his parents, estrangements from siblings) get less scrutiny than the emotions unlocked by Woolf, Barthes, or Derrida
  • Lovers and a best friend called “S” stay hazy, while B ponders at length which passage from The Waves should be read at his funeral — not who would attend
  • A stretch in second person universalises the predicament: “Always on your mind is the prospect of wasting your life”
  • Dillon’s italics and gravity are learned from French theory — the dream is of “italicizing everything,” making language and life “lean away from the solid, upright and reasonable.” Obliquity is everything

Dillon is known for memoir-inflected criticism — Suppose a Sentence (twenty-seven sentences, examined) and Essayism — and the book’s spine is the postmodern self: if we are always works in progress rather than stable selves awaiting discovery, the truest account of a life would deny discrete turning points. The nearest thing to a breakthrough is B realising that writing is how you figure these things out, even if the result is shaggy. One aside lands hardest: fellow postgrads think he is pretentious, and he feels “amused, gratified, properly seen at last.”

Hsu, who once had students compose a “taste biography,” reads the book as the record of a specific formation — hoarding books, songs, and ideas to link a small world to an alternative culture somewhere out there. His questions are generational: does that dream of accumulation, so redolent of the eighties and nineties, survive an internet that supplies endless ready-made poses? Ambivalence is, he concludes, a story of solitude, patience, and faith — qualities contemporary culture seems to militate against.