Solve for X: Essays

Solve for X, the fourth collection of creative nonfiction by Arthur Saltzman, demonstrates the writer's continuing effort to expand on the thematic range, lyrical capacities, and imaginative possibilities of the essay in a signature style marked by what Publishers Weekly deemed Saltzman's "riskily mellifluous language."
The twenty-five essays that constitute this volume investigate a wide range of concerns: from child prodigies to the problems and pleasures of chance, from the generation of our species to the generation gap, from the mind-body problem to the paradoxical purpose of pointlessness in human endeavors, from the culture of cars to the culture of guns, from our phobias to our foibles. Here too are investigations into the methods and meanings of Dante and Henry James as well as the seductions and pitfalls of literary popularity. Leavened with a companionable wit and an often self-deprecating humor, the pieces are pervaded, girded, and highlighted by persistent wordplay and literary allusions from a lifetime spent on both sides of the educator's desk.
Collectively these essays serve as verbal forays, poetic meditations, luminous departures, and lessons in delight. As Modern Language Review attests, "Saltzman's prose is pithy, allusive, elegant. . . . In stylistic virtuosity, [he] comes perhaps closest to Updike." In Solve for X we are invited to witness Saltzman's ongoing improvisations and negotiation with and through words as conducted in the busy intersection of fact and figuration, argument and invention, experience remembered and memory remade.