Review: 'All the Wrong Places,' by Philip Connors

You'll be forgiven if, for the first hundred-plus pages of Philip Connors' "All the Wrong Places," you believe you're reading a straightforward memoir of one young man's loss and coping. As the book opens, we meet Connors' younger brother Dan — a blue-collar worker who in his off hours pilots a hot-air balloon. A casual coming-of-age story is filled in, as Connors describes a summer move to New York to intern for the Nation, and then the first section closes with Dan's suicide in his early 20s. Ah, the reader might think: While suicide is terrible and shattering, "All the Wrong Places" seems early on to situate itself as a memoir akin to many: bad event at the start, followed by a few hundred pages of searching, followed by something like resolution.

The second of the book's three sections shakes that sense only a little: It's set in the 1990s, during which Connors returned to New York, got a job at the Wall Street Journal, lived in pre-gentrification Bedford-Stuyvesant, dated a manic writer, called sex lines. Connors continues to struggle with his loss, and seek his way: "I fear I'll one day put a gun to my head to know what that feels like, to bring myself closer to the one person I can't seem to reach another way," he tells the manic writer he, by section's end, is no longer dating.

Connors' writing is never less than fine — "I got a little tingle from being in proximity to self-inflicted suffering, but I didn't want to have to do anything about it," he writes — so the reader mostly rolls page-flippingly along, if not quite sure how the whole thing's going to crystallize.

The third section begins with 9/11, and Connors writes of his attempt that day to get to his office at the Wall Street Journal, what he witnessed, and, somehow, suddenly, the book catches not by cohering perfectly, but by exposing itself fully: This is a book of fragments, of things not adding up. It's not that Connors uses that September tragedy, yet the book is organized such that, at that moment, a host of seemingly extraneous details — the poetry of Frederick Seidel, questions about how to take part authentically of a racially divided community, sexual intimacy, grammar, coping with loss — come together to make clear that the book will not be resolving in any classical sense.

When Connors leaves New York shortly after the attacks, the reader can feel how desperately he must get out, and when Connors heads to the Southwest — where he last saw his brother — the reader feels an almost tingling correctness in the choice.

And when the book ends with a mixture of destruction and brief but deep sentiment, this reader almost couldn't help but be amazed by how well a book about not resolving things neatly closes so beautifully.

Weston Cutter is from St. Paul and lives and teaches in Fort Wayne, Ind.