PositiveBOMBA recognition of skepticism about...form pulses through Figure It Out—and Koestenbaum’s work writ large ... Koestenbaum’s pointillistic method relies upon synapses between text fragments. Indeed, it isn’t quite fragments that index his signature style but the mental choreography suggested in the intervening schisms. What looks like a fissure in a Koestenbaum essay represents a cognitive gesture ... What unifies these essays isn’t an exploration of a single subject, as has been the case in Koestenbaum’s monographs, such as Humiliation; here, the collection’s title might be read as the writer’s wry, modernist incitement: Figure it out ... Koestenbaum’s writing, like his interests, is diffuse and gymnastic. Cutting a silhouette around white space with his longtime preoccupations of art, desire, form, famous people dead and alive, the work in Figure It Out embodies Lukács’s definition of the essay itself as \'an autonomous and integral giving-of-form to an autonomous and complete life.\' It is in the non-pause that Koestenbaum draws a portrait of a consciousness, free and at its most utterly alive.
