In his engaging, intelligent, and beautifully written collection of essays, Bachelorhood, Phillip Lopate sets out to explore the condition of those who have elected to be single…. In pieces ranging from the slight and delightful to an original exploration of bachelorhood as the basis for a literary genre, Lopate uses a rueful civilized persona, a narrator who is always ironic, but who "is inevitably less than the writer." It is this emotional distance between persona and author, both called Phillip Lopate, that gives the book a disquieting and sometimes uncomfortable tone.

In "My Drawer," the persona sets out to sketch the image of his sensibility, detailing his wryness, sensitivity, and eccentricity. Examining the mementos he cannot discard—old Bambu cigarette papers, DUMP LBJ and IMPEACH NIXON buttons, a brown velvet bow tie—which sort of remind him of a Joseph Cornell box, Lopate establishes with a true writer's economy the once vaguely radical Jewish New Yorker of the hip '60s. He remembers rummaging through his parents' drawer as a child, snooping into adult mystery. It was an emblem of their marriage, their familiarity and difference—the shared life recording "without explanation the ordinariness of this miracle that had given birth" to him. The real miracle is not procreativity, for which Lopate has substituted creativity in his own life, but the mystery of marriage, whose meaning had always been the family. With that most ordinary meaning in doubt, the whole management of familiarity and sexual intimacy, so stubbornly difficult today, seems an impenetrable mystery of the past….

Lopate illustrates the bachelor sensibility using four themes: women and love, friendships, the bachelor as artist and thinker, or "controlled procreator." The last term suggests a central theme: the emotional condition of a man who is childless yet who teaches children as an occupation, who is "locked out of what society regards as the heart of the quotidian: family life," but who has a more poignant regard for domesticity than most who are married. It is a condition defined by notions of freedom and integrity, which inform his suspicions about marriage, his discontentments, and finally, his acceptance of his state. Instead of the easy pleasure of self-pity, Lopate pursues the adult joy of self-sufficiency.

In his richest essay, "Bachelorhood and Its Literature," he asks whether there is a legitimate or concocted genre represented by writers like Sei Shonagon, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Caesare Pavese, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes. Lopate wishes his intelligent ruminations to serve as the cohering piece of the book, as well as to add his name to such a roster of minor immortal talents. He is plausible arguing that bachelor sensibility is the basis for a genre, but the essay fails to be the cohering piece of the book. Instead, all its richness is cunningly used to avoid exploring the psychology of this actual state.

That emotional evasion hovers over many pieces, and finally the reader is unwilling to accept as a substitute the excellent prose, sentence after graceful sentence. Lopate rests on his cleverness, which is always disarming the reader about to object to his romanticization of New York's Spanish working class or the garish grit of 42nd Street. The essay that lies at the heart of the book is not on bachelorhood at all, but on Lionel Trilling. When he died, Lopate felt alone, without the "protector" of his youth. Trilling was mentor and model, the intellectual jewel of Columbia, the very icon of reticence and good taste and Arnoldian sensibility, despite being a New York Jew. He lingers with Lopate as his ideal reader, and I think the model of the man is what Lopate would wish to achieve in himself, transformed for these times and for his special state. The desire to be moral and to be elegant which are so associated with Matthew Arnold and Trilling are also paramount with Lopate. My complaint has nothing to do with such excellent aspirations, or with the absence of gush, or the distance from himself and his past which characterize the book. All that is absolutely proper. I complain that the man who offers his life and taste and mind and experience, no less than those of his mother and father and friends, remains for us an entertaining stranger.

Lopate may very well have defined a literary genre and for him this may be the beginning of an adoptive position from which rich work will come. What we need to feel in the work is that the considerable talent and intelligence are indeed in the service of more than eloquence and elegance.