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Fiction and Non-fiction

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

By Adam Phillips

Penguin, £20

“The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?” Thus Adam Phillips, essayist and analyst, whose books cunningly match Freudian insights to an erudite, engaging style – books with titles such as Going Sane and On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored.

Phillips’s aphoristic bag is very much the kind of dialectical switcheroo canvassed above. Missing Out, an essay on getting or not getting what we want, and the difference between the two, is full of paradoxical quips: “We get into relationships only by trying to get out of them . . . All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of someone else’s needs.” And most thoroughly apropos: “We can be fobbed off by the satisfactions of getting it and oddly enlivened by the perplexity of not getting it.”

“Not getting it” here entails unexpected potential amid a world of familiar hurt. We seem, says Phillips, to have a more precise notion of the life we could have lived than the one we actually possess (if that’s the right verb). Whether we’re railing at our constrained lives or justifying having bailed out, we know, or think we know, too well what might have been.

And knowing is often our besetting trouble, as in the cases of Hamlet, Othello and Lear, all of whom Phillips subtly diagnoses with a morbid urge to interpretation. (Mostly subtly, at any rate, though Othello is “someone in a need-to-know situation”.)

In its latter chapters Missing Out turns into a disquisition on “getting it” in several senses, from the feeling of being excluded from a joke to the assurance that while we “have” sex we don’t really “get” it.

Phillips’s style doesn’t come without its frustrations. He’s developed a habit of hedging around his apercus with little caveats that sound canny at first and then uncertain. Nothing gets defined without a clausal nod toward “whatever else it means”, so that you start to wonder what such locutions are shying away from. I look forward to Phillips’s paradoxical, parenthetical study of all that “else”. BRIAN DILLON

Farther Away

By Jonathan Franzen

Fourth Estate, £16.99

Faced with an entire bookful of essays by a novelist, you need to ask yourself if you admire the writer enough to be patient with his or her hobbies, quirks and obsessions. And is this writer interesting enough to hold your attention when writing book reviews or giving speeches or just letting off steam?

In Franzen’s case the answer to both is a resounding yes. Anyone who loves Freedom and The Corrections will be fascinated by this selection. It opens with a commencement address to college graduates in Ohio (much more entertaining than you might imagine, and beautifully argued to boot). There’s a lengthy piece on China, where Franzen went to investigate the eco-credibility of a golf accessory in the shape of a puffin, which he’d been given as a birthday present. (He hates golf). His first impression of Shanghai? “It was as if the gods of world history had asked: ‘Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?’ and this place had raised its hand and said, ‘Yeah!’ ”