A SCREAM GOES THROUGH THE HOUSE: What Literature Teaches Us About Life

"This book is about the urgency, centrality, and reach of human feeling," begins Weinstein, a Brown University literature professor, proposing to use the key works of a wide range of artists—William Blake, James Baldwin, Eugene O'Neill, Edvard Munch and Ingmar Bergman, among others—to demonstrate the ways in which "art is sustenance; art is transformation." An early chapter manages to breathe new life into one of the most co-opted images of recent memory, Munch's masterwork The Scream, and announces a persistent theme of the links between bodies, which can be hurt, diseased or dead, and feelings. The middle three chapters ("Living in the Body"; "Diagnosis: Narratives of Exposure"; "Plague and Human Connection") engage a host of medical analogies, even comparing an EKG with "soul searching," followed by the quandary of "Saying Death," which asks the rhetorical question: "Is our thinking itself not saturated with death?" While most of the actual works Weinstein points toward go a good way toward posing and answering difficult questions in complex and compelling ways, his book often hems in their multifaceted characters. An epilogue, offering yet another examination of Hamlet, notes: "Depression has its writers"; this meta-work does not finally bring us closer to many of those here, or their mortal coils. (Aug. 5)