In The Empathy Exams...[Jamison] calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours ... her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel someone else’s pain. I’m not sure I’m capable of recommending a book because it might make you a better person. But watching the philosopher in Ms. Jamison grapple with empathy is a heart-expanding exercise ... Ms. Jamison is painfully well read and well informed. She is capable of quoting James Wood, Axl Rose and the philosopher Mark Jefferson in the space of four or five sentences without sounding deranged. At the same time, one or two of her lesser essays find her swinging too frequently from quotation to quotation, as if from vine to vine. Her sentences have an ideal speed-to-power ratio ... I’ll read whatever she writes, as long as I’m around.
...[an] extraordinary and exacting collection of essays ... It is to Jamison’s credit that she doesn’t choose the easy neutrality of the distanced observer, but rather voyages deeply into both extremes, maintaining almost always an admirable awareness about the perils of her approach ... This capacity for critical thinking, for a kind of cool skepticism that never gives way to the chilly blandishments of irony, is very rare ... I can’t say I much like the heavy-handed gender essentialism of her approach, or the moments of over-identification with her subjects, something her best essays rarely permit ... But it’s a danger in keeping with her larger point, which is that it’s worth risking an excess of feeling, rather than taking up the fashionable pose of world-weariness, which all too easily shades into detachment and then to cruelty ... Jamison is capable of the most extraordinary flourishes of image ... There is a glory to this kind of writing that derives as much from its ethical generosity, the palpable sense of stretch and reach, as it does from the lovely vividness of the language itself ... It’s hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year.
The go-to cliché for this kind of writing, or this kind of subject matter, would be 'unflinching.' That would be inaccurate in this case, because while there’s certainly a relentlessness to Jamison’s pursuit of the topic of pain, she does flinch. In fact, one of the more powerful aspects of her writing is the extent to which she is able to flinch while maintaining the steadiness of her gaze ... It’s rare, and quite thrilling, to encounter a writer who so elegantly incorporates her own writerly anxieties into her work, who is so composed and confident about the value of her own self-doubt. (In this sense, her writing often recalls the work of David Foster Wallace, one of many influences she openly engages with throughout the collection.) ... This kind of ambivalence, this doubling back on her own assumptions, is what makes Jamison such a wonderful essayist. What feels especially vital...is the intensity of her self-interrogations, the dramatization of the resistance against her own literary instincts ... Jamison’s writing is often formally inventive, but never appears to be pursuing formal invention for its own sake; it’s always a case, rather, of the material demanding some radical style of treatment, like a condition with no obvious cure.
As a study in vulnerability, but also in types of speech and silence that surround the ailing body, The Empathy Exams is exceptional ... [but] you could object that too much of the personal revelation in this book—the bruised past and bruited pain—is of an order that would not alarm anyone out of adolescence: drink, drugs and bad sex presented as a kind of radical dysfunction. It's the same with some of Jamison's forays into more violent milieus, which can feel (even if it's not true: she recounts a hideous mugging) like slick Vice-style slumming ... The more vexing problems, I think, are tonal and stylistic. For all her exacting attitude to her own place in the stories she tells, and her clear indebtedness (along with everyone else) to David Foster Wallace, Jamison gives in at times to dismayingly vague, cod-poetic or plain overfamiliar formulations ... The more instructive exemplars for the kind of essayism Jamison wants to practice are Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm ... Jamison at her best—in the essays on bodies, her own and others'—is almost their equal.
The Empathy Exams is polished, interesting, and compelling. Jamison pokes so deeply into the idea of empathy that she is able to raise questions about empathy we wouldn't expect. She puts herself on the examination table; her medical and intellectual wounds are here for our consideration. She writes with honesty and openness to critique. If empathy is setting our own discomfort to allow the feelings or symptoms of others to become our feelings, too, than entering into an empathetic contract with Jamison is a worthwhile exercise. These are essays that challenge and provoke, affirm and affect.
Determined to penetrate wildly divergent venues of extreme emotion, Jamison's inquiry is a travelogue of sorts ... Occasionally...her forays fall flat, unable to escape a whiff of poverty tourism despite her awareness of the dangers of voyeurism. But more often, Jamison stitches together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon ... Jamison is a pro at reading deeply, whether into wide-ranging sources such as Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Lucy Grealy, Frida Kahlo, James Agee and Caroline Knapp, or into her personal experiences ... Jamison's attraction to the offbeat and dangerous keeps us agog ... the result is a soaring performance on the humanizing effects of empathy.
Jamison’s essays document suffering in many forms—murders, muggings, incarcerations and adventure races—but her through line remains constant: a clear-eyed, eloquent examination of what it means to be both human and humane. Perhaps Jamison’s greatest strength is her willingness to immerse herself into her work, even at the risk of jeopardizing her objectivity. But we forgive the trespass because it is not a trespass; merely a reminder that the best way to understand anything is to feel it—or try to feel it—firsthand.
Jamison’s not afraid to root through the toughest parts of the human condition, or to attack fundamental questions: Is my pain real? How do I feel the pain of others? If reading a book about all this sounds…painful, rest assured that Jamison writes with such originality and humor, and delivers such scalpel-sharp insights, that it’s more like a rush of pleasure ... Jamison’s essays sometimes falter when she turns to herself—cataloging her scars or recounting, in minute detail, getting punched in the face by a stranger in Nicaragua. But these are just quibbles. To articulate suffering with so much clarity, and so little judgment, is to turn pain into art.
...[a] brilliant collection ... It’s a rallying cry, almost a manifesto ... Jamison wants us to pay attention to both heart and head, to feeling (in all its messiness and pain) and truth-telling (in all its qualifiers and inadequacy). Not every essay in the book is...ambitious, nor are they all equally successful ... Jamison exhibits a powerful ability to dwell in uncertainty while still training rapt attention ... in The Empathy Exams Leslie Jamison has announced herself as its rising star.
The types of empathy—self, painful, guilt, fearful—evoked when reading the pieces are as varied as their subject matter ... these essays will inspire readers to reflect on their own feelings of empathy—not an easy feat in today's disinterested society. This provocative collection will appeal to many types of readers.
A tough, intrepid, scouring observer and vigilant thinker, [Jamison] generates startling and sparking extrapolations and analysis. On the prowl for truth and intimate with pain, Jamison carries forward the fierce and empathic essayistic tradition as practiced by writers she names as mentors, most resonantly James Agee and Joan Didion.
...a heady and unsparing examination of pain and how it allows us to understand others, and ourselves ... Jamison is ever-probing and always sensitive ... friction shatters the clichés about suffering that create distance between people, resulting in a more honest—and empathetic—way of seeing.
Throughout, Jamison exhibits at once a journalist’s courage to bear witness to acts and conditions that test human limits—incarceration, laboring in a silver mine, ultramarathoning, the loss of a child, devastating heartbreak, suffering from an unacknowledged illness—and a poet’s skepticism at her own motives for doing so. It is this level of scrutiny that lends these provocative explorations both earthy authenticity and moving urgency. A fierce, razor-sharp, heartwarming nonfiction debut.
