The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

by Suzannah Lessard

Overview

"Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift." —Kirkus Reviews

Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular talent to combine this profound book–length mosaic— a blend of historical travelogue, reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of cultural reinvention.

This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place and reimagining the world in a time of transition. Whether it be climate change altering the meaning of nature, or digital communications altering the nature of work, the effects of global enclosure on the meaning of place are panoramic, infiltrative, inescapable. No one will finish this book, this journey, without having their ideas of living and settling in their surroundings profoundly enriched.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640093515
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Suzannah Lessard is the bestselling author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, a New York Times Notable Book. A founding editor of The Washington Monthly and a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years, she is a recipient of the Whiting and Lukas Awards, and has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and George Washington University.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION


PART ONE – LISTENING TO THE FIELDS

Chapter One - In the Village

Chapter Two - Suburbophobia

Chapter Three - Gettysburg

Chapter Four - Natchez

Chapter Five - Truth or Consequences

Chapter Six - Flight

Chapter Seven - The View from a Small Mountain


PART TWO - THE HOLLOWED CITY

Chapter One - The Pumpkins of Bergen Street

Chapter Two - The Market

Chapter Three - Youngstown

Chapter Four - The Pendulum

Chapter Five - Freshkills


PART THREE - THE ABSENT HAND

Chapter One - The Corporation in the Woods

Chapter Two - Atopia

Chapter Three - Whose Hand?

Chapter Four - The Inverted Cradle

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Absent Hand

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Big Other Most Anticipated Small Press Book of the Year

"Half memoir, half cri de coeur, Lessard’s lambent, thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays dissects—as an art historian would a picture, a literary critic a text, a medical examiner a cadaver—a diverse swath of America, from Gettysburg and the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania to Truth or Consequences, N.M.; from the seat of an airplane, 30,000–odd feet above Alaska, to the stoops and sidewalks of Brooklyn during the 1990s; from Georgetown, in Washington, where the author used to live, to Youngstown, Ohio." —Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Book Review

"Unusual and engaging . . . A subjective, Whitmanesque meditation on the way we live today . . . What makes this book compelling is not so much where the author goes, but how she reflects on what she sees when she gets there . . . Her wonderfully trenchant observations cast new light on the everyday.” —Witold Rybczynski, The Wall Street Journal

"In an elegant series of essays, New Yorker contributor Lessard (The Architect of Desire) explores the American landscape as a metaphor for recent shifts in the national consciousness . . . Throughout, Lessard offers an extraordinary way of examining and understanding the aesthetics of different environments, whether urban, suburban, or bucolic, which will inspire readers to look with new curiosity at the places around them." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Suzannah Lessard has a truly penetrating intelligence, and here she turns it on a truly compelling target: the landscape that surrounds us, and which we too often see as background if we see it at all. Reading this book will, no kidding, let you look at the world in a new way, and that is a remarkable gift.” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

“The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is a place–based book in the deepest sense. Lessard's keen observations about selected landscapes in which she has thoroughly immersed herself in order to parse their broader underlying meanings ranks her style with Thoreau's experiential mode of writing. The book is pitch–perfect and filled with cogent philosophical interpretations, a loving and shrewd appraisal of the physical fabric of our once– and still–beautiful but fraught country.” —Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies

“The Absent Hand is like no other book I have read, narrated by a writer whose perceptions and language are as radically original as they are eloquent. Observed with a gentle irony, an abiding lyricism, and an acute sense of the comfortable pieties we live by, Suzannah Lessard's hybrid creation—part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, and part sociological document—is an elegy to the all–but–lost power of landscape. Whether commenting on an abandoned but still vibrant village in the Hudson River Valley, 'suburbaphobia' among the educated elite, the 'peculiar stillness' of Sheraton hotel rooms, or the complex artifice of the Disney vision, The Absent Hand explores the way we inhabit the space around us, physically as well as mentally, individually as well as collectively. It is a wise as well as poignant book, leavened by flashes of humor—one that will make you think about the bargains we have made with our natural surroundings and the price we have paid for them.” —Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy

“One of Suzannah Lessard's great gifts is that of seeing, of discerning and explaining the details most of us skip past. She is also gifted at conveying this precise view. Everyone who reads this book will see the American landscape differently, in its urban and rural variety and splendor and disrepair. Readers will also have a clearer appreciation for what is beautiful and why—and of how the unlovely might be restored.” —James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns

“In a series of finely tuned essays that track the author's journey from the Hudson Valley into the Midwest and the South, Lessard explores the relationship between humanity and place that once defined us but, she argues, doesn't any longer.” —Jonathan Hahn, Sierra

“This book of thought–provoking essays queries the nature of place, asking landscapes to reveal their meanings . . . [Lessard] eloquently asks us to look harder at our surroundings, and ask better questions about what we see.” —James S. Russell, Architectural Record

“Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift.” —Kirkus Reviews

“This genre–blurring work of criticism—part history, part travel diary, part personal narrative—explores the contradictions of the American landscape. In episodic chapters, Lessard probes a medley of places: the mountain villages of upstate New York; Brooklyn housing projects; the sprawl and megamall of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania; and plantations in Natchez, Mississippi . . . As Lessard alternates between narrative and analysis, what begins as a pastiche of vignettes builds into an entrancing reconsideration of America’s history, from the spaces of the antebellum South through the landscapes of the Cold War and beyond . . . A stellar work of landscape criticism, a rapturous meditation on the revelatory power of place.” —Booklist

“The value of her decades of research is undeniable . . . In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew. This broad social–historical consideration of American landscapes will satisfy and challenge the most serious reader.” —Shelf Awareness

“Part memoir, part examination of the American cultural landscape. Lessard offers a unique and necessary perspective on the deterioration of our society’s connection to the landscape, manifested most prominently in the book as sprawl.” —Aaron King, The Dirt

From the Publisher

Half memoir, half cri de coeur, Lessard's lambent, thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays dissects—as an art historian would a picture, a literary critic a text, a medical examiner a cadaver—a diverse swath of America, from Gettysburg and the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania to Truth or Consequences, N.M.; from the seat of an airplane, 30,000-odd feet above Alaska, to the stoops and sidewalks of Brooklyn during the 1990s; from Georgetown, in Washington…to Youngstown, Ohio…Lessard devotes much of the book to exploring what she terms America's "atopia," our vast, seemingly unplanned, inchoate, exurban sprawl, which remains to her largely inscrutable and tragic. She writes about such places from what you might call an exalted literary remove. The mode is epistolary, poetic, occasionally honest to a fault…and moral.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Kimmelman

★ 12/03/2018
In an elegant series of essays, New Yorker contributor Lessard (The Architect of Desire) explores the American landscape as a metaphor for recent shifts in the national consciousness. She investigates places near and dear, like the idyllic town of Rensselaerville in the Hudson River Valley where she vacations, and the Brooklyn neighborhood where she lived in the 1990s, as well as those that are unknown to her, like the King of Prussia, Pa., shopping mall. She considers preserved Civil War battlefields and Southern plantations that have been whitewashed of any mention of slavery lest visitors feel the slightest discomfort, and uses the Columbia University campus to gauge the widening conservative-liberal divide. Her musings are richly poetic, even when describing prosaic features of the urban landscape, such as a “garbage truck grinding in a cold rain... a groan from the gut of creation.” Describing how modern development can steadily blight a landscape, she encapsulates this process astutely as an “eerie burglary of the world as we have known it.” Throughout, Lessard offers an extraordinary way of examining and understanding the aesthetics of different environments, whether urban, suburban, or bucolic, which will inspire readers to look with new curiosity at the places around them. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2018-11-13

Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives.

Lessard (The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, 1996), a writer and editor for the New Yorker and Washington Monthly, respectively, is a collector of places—and, she writes, she is amazed by people who aren't, as when she observes "how indifferent air passengers are to the view out the window." Some views are perhaps a little cheerless, such as the industrial wastelands of Ohio or the battlefield at Gettysburg. Some are stunning, and all shape the people who live in them without being aggressively assertive about it, as with the New York village in which she finds "something modestly, collectively triumphant," namely, a shared sense of belonging. Landscape, writes the author, incorporates layers of meaning that lie close to the "hidden springs of personhood," joining families and histories to the world. No matter how difficult some of those landscapes may be, from broken urban neighborhoods to abandoned cemeteries, the meaning is there to be sought out. Lessard usually finds something to like, or at least to point out, about the places she brings up for consideration. One good example is Wall Street, where she logged time as a young worker in a financial world "in which women especially were relegated to a lower order"—no problem, really, inasmuch as she was busy absorbing the place and its glorious and messy chaos. The overall feel of the book, which blends poetic reverie with deeply learned geography and history, is friendly if just on the edge of being too much, of becoming encyclopedic. Still, you've got to like a narrative that includes a search for an elusive Staten Island landfill that ends in unlikely self-discovery: "You felt lonely just looking at it, as if you hadn't spoken to another human being in months, years maybe."

A pleasant hodgepodge of observations on many places, all of them made more interesting than they perhaps really are—and that's quite a gift.

Kirkus Reviews