Book Review: Deborah Levy’s ‘The Position of Spoons’ may be just for the diehard fans

Deborah Levy is a celebrated novelist, memoirist and playwright whose latest book — “The Position of Spoons” — is a petite collection of essays spanning the last few decades of her career. Though Levy calls the entries in her book “intimacies,” at times that feels like the wrong word, given that she spends more pages writing about the influence of other artists than divulging her own inner world. Some of the entries, lasting just two or three pages, feel incomplete.
The mood here is never too serious, with musings on “Blade Runner” and a retelling of “Alice in Wonderland” that has the White Rabbit bounding through southeast London. There’s not one, but two prose poems structured in an “A to Z” style. The collection brings together many of Levy’s pieces that were previously published elsewhere. Several were written as forwards or introductions to works by other authors, perhaps explaining why their audience never seems to be the reader at hand.
The collection might be best for the Levy diehards who don’t want to miss any of her writing that happens between longer works. And the writing here is not the problem – Levy is engaging on subjects from lemons to Sigmund Freud. Her most moving work is in her personal stories, from the titular essay to her recollection, just three pages long, of meeting the eyes of a colleague whose wife had recently died. It’s mainly the purpose of the book that feels askew or absent here. We’re left waiting for Levy to really dig in.
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