Ross Gay and a friend win a basketball game twenty-one to zero. He recounts the victory with considerable pleasure, then supplies a detail: their opponents were twelve-year-olds. A girl watching is unimpressed.
The embarrassment gives us a good introduction to The Book of Delights. Gay does not make delight especially noble, or hurry to extract a lesson from basketball. He enjoys his moment, then lets us see how ridiculous that enjoyment is. On the page he is frequently overenthusiastic, full of associations, running after something he has just said to correct it. What pleases him can seem inconsequential. His gift is making us want to hear exactly how inconsequential it was.
This is not quite what the title might lead us to expect. A book of delights sounds like a guide to finding happiness in ordinary things. Gay certainly writes about plants, food, and strangers’ kindness, but he is first a poet. Much of the pleasure lies in watching him bring something alive in language. One event recalls another; halfway through a sentence he realizes that the first version was not quite right and turns aside. These are not a hundred or so pieces of advice. They show a person thinking on paper.
On his forty-second birthday in 2016, Gay decided to spend a year trying to write a short essay about delight each day. A selection became this book. The continuing practice lends the pieces the intimacy of conversation. Without first studying his biography, we gradually come to know his garden, his friends, and the things that distract him.
How a tomato plant becomes a fellow traveler
In one essay Gay takes a tomato seedling, a gift from a friend, onto an airplane. He protects it along the way, attracting strangers’ attention, an attendant’s joke, and smiles. As landing approaches, he puts out an arm to shield it and remembers his father doing something similar for a child in a car.
Summarize this as evidence of human warmth and much of its interest disappears. What holds us is the way a plant briefly connects people with otherwise separate concerns. Everyone in an airport has somewhere to go. Nobody needs to know anybody else. The seedling, however, is not quite ordinary luggage. It is alive, requires care, and has turned up somewhere distinctly unsuitable for growing vegetables. It gives people something to notice and something to say.
The memory of his father carries the essay further. This is no longer merely an inventory of kindness from strangers. Gay finds himself performing a familiar movement without necessarily having thought about it first. An old experience of being protected returns through the act of protecting. What parents leave behind need not arrive as a remembered instruction. It can survive in an arm’s response.
Here we can see a difference between an essay and a lesson. A lesson may be settled in advance, awaiting an illustration. Here the event takes the writer somewhere he had not planned to go. Replace the seedling with any “beautiful thing” and the general conclusion might survive, but the father would not appear in quite the same way. A particular thing is worth writing about because it has its own directions.
Such essays also reward an unhurried reading. Gay’s associations can feel excessive: a sentence almost ends, then acquires another clause. But a reader searching only for the main point may discard the best parts as digressions. Often we come to know someone through just such details—what matters disproportionately to him, what makes him laugh, what suddenly reminds him of home.
The weeds still have to come out
It is easy to mistake Gay for someone who can find a benefit in every bad thing. His writing about bindweed plays with that expectation. Gardeners dislike this persistent weed, and he is pulling it up too. Even as he tries to control its spread, he wants to write about delight in his encounter with it.
The distinction is small but practical. Preparing a cheerful essay does not lead him to declare that the weed poses no problem for his vegetables. The garden still needs tending. The weed still needs pulling. Writing does not have to reclassify reality as good news.
His optimism consequently keeps some rough edges. We often alternate between acknowledging that something is bad, as though nothing else could be said about it, and searching for its bright side, as though that were the only way to recover. Gay’s garden accommodates more than one feeling. He dislikes the trouble the weed causes without surrendering the whole afternoon to that dislike. The words that occur to him, the leaves he notices, the sudden amusement need not wait until the problem is solved.
This makes apparently casual interruptions important. A broad statement has barely appeared before experience challenges it. He wants to put something attractively, then discovers that the attractive version is not quite honest. Delight becomes specific through this movement back and forth, rather than arriving as a sealed answer.
Enjoying the book will partly depend on enjoying this narrator’s company. He is warm, humorous, and inclined to travel a long way down a side road. Some readers will follow gladly; others will wish he would get to the point. In an essay collection this is not incidental. What draws us is both the subject and our willingness to spend time with a particular voice.
A high five is not the same experience for everyone
A young stranger sees Gay absorbed in work and offers him an encouraging high five. Gay welcomes the gesture, then specifies his own situation: he is a large nonwhite man. What kinds of approach feel pleasant to him have something to do with those circumstances.
The turn prevents the piece from ending at “Wouldn’t it be nice if strangers were friendlier?” Who makes a gesture, toward whom, and where can change its meaning substantially. Gay does not speak for everyone. By putting himself more fully into the account, he leaves readers room to say that they might feel differently.
This is particularly valuable in writing about pleasure. Differences can easily be treated as spoiling the mood. If we are discussing lovely things, why bring up who feels safer or who is more likely to be misunderstood? Yet bodies were present all along. They shape how someone moves through public space and how others approach. Omitting them would make the story less truthful.
Gay’s correction also changes his relationship with readers. He becomes less a teacher of appropriate feeling than someone willing to explain where his feeling comes from. We can enjoy his story without sharing his response. This allows a less coercive intimacy than asking everyone to be moved by the same thing.
Why keep writing, one piece at a time?
In an NPR interview Gay said that before beginning he expected it to be difficult to find something delightful every day. After a while, he had too much material. The change is worth noticing without turning it into a life-changing formula. More simply, preparing to write made him attend to things he might otherwise have passed over. Paying attention, in turn, gave him more to write about.
Attention does not automatically produce an essay. In another interview he discussed both the short time allowed for daily first drafts and the help of friends in his writing. The apparently conversational voice still involves choices. Experience does not arrange itself on a page. A writer must find a path from one thing to another that someone else can follow.
The book therefore offers something beyond approachable subjects. Apparently insignificant experiences may be ones we have not yet found a way to tell. A seedling or a basketball victory not worth boasting about can open a memory or expose vanity. Once written, they expand a record of life otherwise dominated by major achievements and setbacks.
Gay’s attention to small things does not imply ignorance of larger events. His writing year crossed the 2016 American election. In interview he acknowledged being discouraged by public events; continuing to write about delight was a deliberate commitment of attention. That choice has limits and cannot answer every political question. Yet the care, accidents, and laughter a person actually encounters need not disappear from his experience simply because they do not represent the whole world.
This is a book to dip into, not necessarily finish in order at once. Its best invitation may be to meet a writer who looks more closely, rather than to become more optimistic. After following him awhile, the twenty-one-to-zero game is still funny. And then we notice that he has included himself in the joke: the person who would like to seem impressive, and knows he is not quite as impressive as he would like.