THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS

A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative,
about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.

Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book
Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of
Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the
world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he
adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of
which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this
engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous
accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year
of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging
ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes
clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise
in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch
obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying
mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large
dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as
the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones,
and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds
interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the
head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the
reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such
miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,”
eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even
throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just
because we can.

An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.