Adam Phillips’s books, including his latest, On Giving Up, have a way of starting as if they’ve already begun. Reading the first few lines, I often feel as though I’ve entered into a room uninvited, or at least unanticipated; a cluttered parlor where a conversation is underway. This scene can be mildly embarrassing, bewildering, or irksome (depending on how much we dislike being befuddled), but there is comfort in it too. One is forgiven, in such a scene, for listening too intently, for trying to catch the thread of the discourse, to orient oneself before joining the fray. Indeed, that may be exactly the pleasure, and privilege, of the unanticipated guest: formalities of hospitality are suspended; one feels neither guilt nor gratitude for being present. And the action, to use a phrase favored by Phillips, can begin without delay.
I tried to start my review of On Giving Up in a similar manner. It begins like this:
There’s a game my girlfriend and I sometimes play. Well, really, it’s more of an argument: “Fuck, Marry, Kill” with the past, present, and future. My answer, which I take to be a good, solid American answer, is fuck the present, marry the future, and kill the past. My reasoning is that you should always want to fuck the present, to live in the moment (as the advertisers say), screw every hole of the now. Likewise, marrying the future is admirable, like monogamy, and prudent, like monogamy; it’s a wish, and a promise, for stability and grace. You have to believe in the future, be loyal to what comes next, to what and who you are always becoming. And that leaves only the past to kill. Which, so what? It’s the past. It’s already passed.
My girlfriend—who is also an American, but an American writer and lover of fiction—has a different answer. She says you should fuck the future, marry the past, and kill the present. I definitely see the appeal of fucking the future; it’s where the action is, the excitement, the unknown. The future is a stranger, and we all want to fuck strangers. And for her, the past is too precious and monumental to kill. Memory is a repository, a treasured burden worth bearing; it’s what you can’t seem to get rid of, even if sometimes you want to. So, you marry it. But here’s where the trouble starts: I can’t allow her to kill the present. When we get going on this topic, she says, “Well, what’s the present? Isn’t it always slipping away? Isn’t it gone the moment you try to do something in it?” And I say, “No! The present is this,” slicing my hand through the air, as if to catch it. “Isn’t this precious?”
(Hopefully you’re enticed!)
I read more than a dozen Adam Phillips books to write this review, which was too many. Phillips himself has said the ideal way to read one of his books is: read it, allow it to provoke whatever thoughts it does in you, then forget about it completely. That wasn’t an option for me — I was aiming for synthesis — and the accumulative effect of reading his books one after another and thinking about his total corpus was, admittedly, a bit disorienting — slightly vertiginous and unmooring, like I’d contracted a minor flu or an ear infection. I also found it enormously rewarding.
I hope my review is a little unmooring too. And I hope you enjoy it. As always, thanks for reading.
-Sam
P.S. The art for the piece was done by Tyler Comrie, and I think it’s great. I love working with The Baffler, especially with Jess Bergman, who edited the piece.
I read your wonderful review in Baffler. Lying Fallow has been one of my mantras as well as Good Enough Mother since I read Winnicott and Kahn in the 60s. I did not know about Kahn's sad demise. Recently discovered, I regularly binge on Adam Phillips's YouTube performances, waiting eagerly for the end of the presentation or roundtable discussion for the Q&A sessions; his replies are kind, humorous and sometime cutting. Phillips makes me think of Lacan, in the way he loops and curls in such a byzantine manner that I have to let go and just let the words wash over me. I too wonder where he puts his wickedness.