"Over the holidays, my plan is to read "Attention Seeking," in which Phillips, a psychoanalyst who is also a brisk and elastic writer, reclaims the titular activity as prosocial, meaningful, and valuable. I'm going to be honest. I don't think I will like this book very much. I anticipate shaking my fist and shouting, "Wrong, wrong, wrong!" But maybe I will instead discover the ways in which I am wrong, wrong, wrong about attention-seeking."
"I acquired a copy of this around the time it came out, in 2011, and let it sit unread on my shelf for fifteen years. Searching for something to take on a trip this past spring, I grabbed it on an impulse. The book impressed me. Hollinghurst's novel begins in 1913, when a Cambridge student named George brings his friend Cecil home for a school break. Cecil is a swaggering aristocrat with ambitions to be a poet; when he departs, he leaves behind an arch ode as a flirtatious gift to his friend's teen-age sister, Daphne-though it seems also to allude to a trysting relationship with George."
Recommendations include Attention Seeking by Adam Phillips, which reclaims attention-seeking as prosocial, meaningful, and valuable. Phillips is a psychoanalyst and brisk, elastic writer who has produced more than twenty short works riffing on underexplored everyday topics such as giving up, missing out, kissing, tickling, and boredom; a new book about the gap between desire and reality is forthcoming. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child begins in 1913, when Cambridge student George brings his friend Cecil home; Cecil, an aristocratic aspiring poet, leaves an arch ode to Daphne that also seems to allude to a possible tryst with George. An annual list of the year’s best new titles can expand reading lists.
Read at The New Yorker
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