The titular first essay is a perfect way into this almost dauntingly intelligent book, employing a few of the author’s signature gambits to winning effect. There are 13 numbered sections: How To Disappear, Ways To Disappear, What They Will Say, People Who Disappeared, Why You Are Not Famous, and so forth. Each of these is an exhaustive list of possibilities for that item, funny, provocative, relatable, vulnerable, cynical, and sobering by turns. This essay is one of the two most straightforward in the book, the other being the third, The Uber Diaries, a series of vignettes describing the author’s experiences as a rideshare driver after a big Hollywood project he had been involved in fell apart and left him disastrously overextended. All the terrible things one might imagine could happen to a driver at the hands of his riders do indeed happen, but lead to an epiphanic ending where the line between driver and rider dissolves. The next essay is much more conceptual or theoretical, titled On the Desire To Reject Narcissism: Notes Toward a Follow-Up Essay to “The Uber Diaries.” Possible openings for such an essay, numbered from 1 to 131 follow, though some are printed with strikethroughs and others only vaguely described, and some sections simply reprint poems by other people, among them Franz Wright, Fred Chappell, and Molly Peacock. Heady stuff. Subsequent essays contain autobiographical material from a painful childhood and a spiky writing career, plus detailed recountings of certain stories Minor is obsessed with, most importantly the fate of eight sailors in a 1968 sailing race. His favorite competitor: “Bernard Moitessier, the sailor who quit the race because he simply wanted to sail the seas.” It is poignantly evident that that’s exactly what Minor means to do with this book: quit the race, sail the seas. You don’t have to be as smart as he is to enjoy the ride.
