I’m auditing a course at Harvard College for the first time since COVID.  Between travel, Vermont, and life, I had gotten out of the habit of auditing, something that had given me great pleasure when we first returned to Cambridge 20 years ago.  It gave me the opportunity to study literature, something I had not done during four years of college between my courses for med school and my major, government.

The course which meets twice  week for 75 minutes is given by James Wood, the revered reviewer of books for ‘The New Yorker’ and the Professor of Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard.  Born in England in 1965, Wood was a reviewer for the Guardian and The New Republic before leaving England and moving to Cambridge with his author wife, Claire Messud.

I had taken two of  his courses previously, one on consciousness in the novel from Austen to Tolstoy and his course on essays which I am taking a second time. The course begins with the giants—Montaigne, Orwell, Woolf and then explores more contemporary writers like Levi, Garner, and many others. Among them is J.D. Daniels and since his was one of the few names I didn’t recognize, I took his book out of the library.

Daniels is a bit of a cipher. This book was published eight years ago and garnered two significant awards as well as some fine reviews. My favorite literary figure, Geoff Dyer is quoted in the blurbs as follows “What a nutjob! Increasingly these three words constitute my highest praise for my ideal of a writer and in this regard, J.D. Daniels takes the biscuit.”

Well, Dyer and I must have been reading different books. I found these six essays to be at best, interesting and at worst, offputting. The book is written in the form of letters from Cambridge, MA (about his experience training to be a mixed martial arts fighter), Majorca (about his experience on an Israeli commerical boat), Kentucky (his original home), Level Four (about an acquaintance with a serious drug and mental health problem), Devil’s Tower, and the Primal Horde (about a weird group grope).  The essay about Majorca was chosen for Best Essays of 2013, and the book won the Whiting Foundation and the Terry Southern Prize in 2013, but after that Daniels appears to have vanished.  There’s nothing on Wikipedia and nothing on an interent search. Was he a one hit wonder or has something happened in his life?   Sadly, I’ll miss Wood’s comments about Daniels since we’ll be in London at the time but  I’ll keep thinking about him.