Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro

Essayist McCarthy (Sharks, Death, Surfers) serves up a muddled meditation on transience and the vagaries of time. The four interconnected essays are more suggestive than argumentative. For instance, the opening, “Flowers,” weaves together observations about the author’s aversion to the permanence of tattoos, John Hersey’s accounts of Hiroshima residents whose clothing patterns were seared onto their skin by the atomic bomb, and early 20th-century British archaeologist Leonard Woolley’s practice of dating his findings relative to the depth at which they were buried. All are ostenstibly part of McCarthy’s investigation into “attempts to establish a written record that will... assist us in forming the memory,” but the takeaway remains unclear. Recurrence is a major theme across the four pieces (“Repetition is continuity, is life”), and McCarthy often returns to the same evidence to offer new considerations of its meaning. For instance, discussions of the Jaws franchise highlight the films’ dependence on repetition (“Is this going to happen every damn time, this shark attack on a human, this flowering of corpses...?”) and considerations of photography muse about the medium’s replicability through duplication, but again, McCarthy’s larger point remains out of focus. Every time it feels like she is about to show her hand, she darts to a new topic, giving this the feel of a shaggy collection of loosely related anecdotes. Readers will struggle to make sense of it all. Photos. (Nov.)