Objects of Our Desire: Exploring Our Intimate Connections with the Things Around Us

Akhtar, a poet and professor of psychiatry, has produced a tedious and disjointed analysis of things and our relationship to them in his 37th book. If "things" seems like an overly general topic, that's because it is, and while Akhtar tries to break the book into subtopics of things ("everything," "something" and "nothing"), this effort does little to clarify for the reader what the author would like to express. Akhtar frequently resorts to obvious, uninspired lists of things, such as "items left on subway trains" and items that people collect, from "A to almost Z." He jumps from "nostalgic things" to "sexy things" (with an explicit description of an adolescent boy's desire for his teacher that seems absurdly out of place) to "becoming a thing," describing in detail our bodies' possible fates once we die. The analysis starts to disintegrate when Akhtar says asking a child to give up some of his or her toys is "one less recognized type of 'child abuse,' " and continues its downward trajectory to the book's end, when the author offers an Indian parable that does little to explain his intentions for his explorations into such a broad subject. Agent, Marly Rusoff. (Aug.)