[In the following review of Dancing at the Edge of the World, Mairs concludes that the volume lacks unity but serves as “a fine companion” to Le Guin's fiction.]

All writers want to preserve the words they’ve labored hour upon hour to squeeze out onto the page—even, or perhaps especially, the ones composed for specific occasions, ephemeral words, which threaten to dissolve in the May sunshine gracing a college commencement or fade along with the snapshots of a cross-country journey or vanish with the magazine gone belly-up after two promising issues. I’m not sure all writers will admit to such an urge, but I’m convinced we all feel it.

Out of it arises a work like Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dancing at the Edge of the World, which draws together between durable covers miscellaneous essays, travel journals, commencement addresses, lectures, informal talks, and reviews spanning 12 years. The product is not a thematically or rhetorically coherent text, not a “book” in that sense at all. Really, it’s more of a jumble.

But then … what’s wrong with that? This is what the British call a jumble sale, the chancy source of some of life’s treasures: the cracked mug on which a woman, diaphanously clad, rides a butterfly-drawn chariot under the title ECSTASY; five out of six tulip- shaped wine glasses; or, for 10 cents, Sammy Snake, 6 feet of chartreuse plush, who will spend a decade entwined in the bedclothes of one child or another.

Dancing at the Edge of the World holds this sort of plenty, unpredictable and uneven but, for those very reasons, a trove of delights: insightful, impassioned, sometimes lyrical, often funny.

No matter how various its components, a compilation like this one must shove them into some sort of linear order. Le Guin has chosen, to good effect, a chronological arrangement rather than some more subtle logical principle. This system, in its plainness, doesn’t draw attention to itself. And it does, as she points out in the introduction, “provide a sort of mental biography, a record of responses to ethical and political climates, of the transforming effect of certain literary ideas, and of the changes of a mind.” In one instance. “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” she makes the matter of writerly development explicit by printing her reconsiderations after a decade in the margins of the original text.

The only exception to the book’s straight chronological order is the collection in a separate section of 17 reviews, also arranged chronologically, at the end. This position is unfortunate, since it makes the reviews seem tacked on and prevents the book from ending on its strongest note. “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” a persuasive critique of the “books-or-babies myth” promulgated by misogynists and feminists alike.

But the reviews, of subjects as various as Star Wars, the “maverick genius” of Mervyn Peake, and May Sarton’s poetry, reveal pleasurable insights into Le Guin’s literary and cinematic tastes. “How many novelists are there writing now,” she asks in a review of Doris Lessing’s The Sentimental Agents, “who can make you really angry?” It’s as good a criterion for choosing to read a book by Lessing as I’ve seen. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss these reviews, and I couldn’t have figured out a better place to stick them, either.

Not surprisingly, however, she is at her best in the pieces that offer more scope for invention and reflection. Using increasingly sophisticated, though never pretentious, feminist theoretical insights, she virtually revises the world, that is, sees it anew, in terms that subvert “Euclidean, European, or masculinist” values that have led to social injustices and the threat of global destruction.

Less skilled writers have wrought out of these themes some pretty heavy-handed and flatfooted polemics. But Le Guin’s prose, true to the title of this collection, dances. Here she is, for instance, illustrating for Bryn Mawr’s graduates their “mother tongue” as differentiated from “the language of the fathers”:

“John have you got your umbrella I think it’s going to rain Can you come play with me? If I told you once I told you a hundred times. Things here just aren’t the same without Mother, I will now sign your affectionate brother James. Oh what am I going to do? So I said to her I said if he thinks she’s going to stand for that but then there’s his arthritis poor thing and no work. I love you. I hate you. I hate liver. Joan dear did you feed the sheep, don’t just stand around mooning. Tell me what they said, tell me what you did. Oh now my feet do hurt. My heart is breaking Touch me here, touch me again.”

The whole jumble of human experience heaped up in these few lovingly chosen phrases.

Those who appreciate Le Guin’s novels will find the pieces in Dancing at the Edge of the World no substitute for their intricacies of vision and language. But this volume makes a fine companion, and on occasion a guide, to her fiction, offering insight into the writer at work. She differs for instance, from the Hero who “has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark （which drops dead）; second, that the central concern of the narrative, including the novel, is conflict and third that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.” Her narrative model is, rather, a “carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle.” Like these containers. Dancing at the Edge of the World is full to bursting.