The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

Curator and art historian Lewis’s definition of “the rise,” like her book, is a slippery one—at once intuitively familiar but not easy to pin down. Her approach is less an exploration of successes derived from failure than a discursive examination of the familiar labors and cognitive sensations that surround failure, alongside a celebration of the new resources gained in the process of failing. These come from diverse and seemingly unrelated vantages: a great work of dance’s genesis as a deadline neared; the endurance found through ecstatic surrender during an Arctic exploration; and the more predictable studies of business failures that lead to unexpected success, like the famed Hollywood “Black List” of “screenplays that failed to find any notice or acclaim [that] were now ranked and recast as the ones to watch.” Readers seeking toolkits and exercises should look elsewhere, and the book’s later chapters run through familiar trends in positive psychology (“grit,” innovation through play) that lack the je ne sais quois of the successful early sections. Nevertheless, Lewis’s erudition in art and history is matched by her sympathy to the iterative failures of great art, making inspiring reading for those in the process of creation. Illus. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Endeavor. (Mar.)