Koestenbaum has long been fascinated with people who rarely speak or who speak awkwardly — the breathy banalities of Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Kennedy, for example. He crushes on evasion and ambiguity, but his own prose has always been distinguished by its tautness and agility. The new book is a more relaxed performance, however. The pieces feel rawer, some almost deliberately jagged, even unfinished; they trail off, or end in sudden dissolve. The polish has been sacrificed for a kind of intimacy, of interrupting the writer at his desk, midsentence.

Ah, yes: The bark of another Wayne Koestenbaum collection. Our great, roving, leashless dog of modern essay-writing — constantly sniffing at the groin of an idea, taking in its rich musks, savoring them with two wide nostrils — bounds up the slope, yet again, for a book of essays that audit a series of extremely indulgent, largely beautiful, mostly dissociated objects of fascination.

A recognition of skepticism about...form pulses through Figure It Out—and Koestenbaum’s work writ large.

Unlike many examples of theory, which can be intellectually rigorous but narratively stagnant, Koestenbaum’s essays actively analyze and move like investigations, encouraging readers to follow along like Watson to Holmes. Although the writing can be wordy and indirect, the essays are engaging, and it becomes an adventure to follow Koestenbaum’s playful and occasionally raunchy train of thought.

No matter the focus, Koestenbaum proceeds with an agile, sidling insouciance. Prone to enthusiasms, he can verge on hyperbole, and a few pieces are slight, leaning too close to self-help, a perilous direction for an author so exquisitely self-absorbed. Yet it is his unswerving commitment to his own taste and instinct that allows him so much insight into the works of others who are equally committed to their affinities and practices. What he beautifully observes about poet Adrienne Rich might just as well be said of him: 'Rich was a natural historian with an ear for the music that politics makes in the body.'.

... rambling.

... inventive but self-absorbed.