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!’ ”

His essays on the stories of Alice Munro and on works of American fiction that we have ignored or forgotten are as exhilarating as cold showers on a muggy day; his tribute to that grandaddy of all Nordic crime novels, The Laughing Policeman, is as affectionate as it is unexpected.

The bittersweet title piece re-creates the short time Franzen spent as a “castaway” on an island off the Chilean coast after the publicity tour for Freedom and the death of his friend David Foster Wallace.

Just one thing: you don't have to be passionate about birds to enjoy this book, but if birdwatchers drive you bonkers, it might be one to avoid. ARMINTA WALLACE

The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus

By Andy Martin

Simon Schuster, £14.99

This might be described as a book of pop philosophy, serious in content but flippant in tone. The cover evokes an old-fashioned boxing poster that might have been stuck to a lamp post in years gone by. That idea is echoed by the blurb, which talks of Sartre and Camus being in the red and blue corners and, of course, of Simone de Beauvoir being Sartre’s second. Subtle it is not, nor is it, ultimately, the most effective way to describe the professional and personal relationship between two of France’s best-known writers.

Indeed, Andy Martin blurs the sporting metaphor when he writes about Sartre also being a skier (a poor one) and Camus enjoying swimming. (Could the book also have been entitled The Skier vs the Swimmer?)

Martin starts with a confession about stealing one of Sartre’s books when younger, then puts himself in the narrative on a number of occasions in order to place himself ringside, so to speak. Too often the conceit comes across as self-regarding and adds little to the narrative: “Sartre studied at the École Normale Supérieure on the Rue d’Ulm, in the Quartier Latin of Paris (where I followed in his footsteps, 60-odd years later)”; or “I was in Sing Sing penitentiary not long ago and I happened to cite Sartre’s most quoted one-liner . . .”

There is also some very faux street talk, as in: “Keep coolly cool. He feared the rocket in the pocket . . . He had to rein himself in, to keep himself in check, lest he explode too soon.”

The impression is of someone trying to be the hippest prof on the block. More's the pity, as there are some illuminating passages in Sartre vs Camus – but it is no knockout.  PóL Ó MUIRí