In her expansive and inventive new book, Hunt uses her father’s incomplete manuscript as a vessel to communicate with him 20 years after his death ... To attempt to categorize The Unwritten Book is to diminish the effect of reading it. Hunt studied geology, and her fascination with the bedrock of the natural world overlaps with her elemental love of storytelling ... by turns mesmerizing, philosophical and funny.
Here the yearning of a daughter eager to understand her father in his absence resonates. How well can one possibly know the dead—or the living, for that matter? Hunt circles this question with growing intensity as she draws lines between her mother’s overstuffed house, her father’s alcoholism and her own relationship to art. In an especially wide-ranging essay, she writes about the love of One Direction that she shares with her daughters, and pieces together literary criticism and personal history relating to Patti Smith, Borges, motherhood and a surgery to remove one of her ovaries.
It’s a characteristically wild effort that defies genre distinctions, flits from the profound to the mundane with fierce intelligence and searching restlessness, and at its best, delves deep into the recesses of the human heart with courageous abandon ... The Unwritten Book is Hunt’s idiosyncratic version of a grief memoir, an alternately crazed and cool musing on grief, literature, and her late father’s identity as both a man and an aspiring writer ... Hunt astutely parses her father’s words even as she refuses to reduce them to simple explanations, deftly teases out the relationships between his fiction and his life while allowing for mystery to remain, annotates and elaborates and expatiates with charm, wit, and an insistence on her father’s fundamental unknowability ... Hunt’s mind is capacious and supple ... Watching her link wildly disparate topics is part of the fun ... But...some readers will feel lost, confused by its jumble of styles, approaches, and stories ... The Unwritten Book ponders and enacts this art of losing with an intoxicating blend of humor and pathos.
Her father’s unfinished novel is satisfyingly rife with spies, international intrigue, and supernatural occurrences. The idea that these may be inventions of Samantha Hunt, the elder Hunt, or 'actual' occurrences that took place in our shared reality is similarly satisfying, deputizing the reader as a fellow detective and elevating this mystery story to a meta-level ... Interpolated within these chapters are essays...peppered liberally with references to many other texts, as though Hunt is trying to catalog every book she has ever read ... these impressionistic musings often go nowhere, but taken as a whole they make up a portrait of a dazed daughter trying to make sense of the grief of her father’s loss. At times, Hunt wanders quite far ... The Unwritten Book is a treatise on fiction disguised as a work of fiction … or a work of fiction cleverly hidden in a nonfiction book.
Make no mistake: The Unwritten Book is a downer. At times, it’s a major one ... Hunt gazes into this darkness, but she never stops looking for the cracks. She understands, as Leonard Cohen sang, 'that’s how the light gets in' ... It’s a measure of Hunt’s generosity—to the reader, but also to herself—that her answers to...questions evolve throughout the book.
Everywhere she looks—and she's looking hard—she finds evidence of the ways we blinker ourselves to the inevitable. Practically everything she encounters feels death-stalked to her. But that's not to suggest that the book is morbid. The pages of her father's book are annotated with lively ruminations, memories and critical readings. One section remarkably weaves the fandom she shares with her daughters for the boy band One Direction with an ovarian-cancer scare. In the process, she inverts conventional tropes about motherhood and domesticity ... the peculiar, unique pleasure of The Unwritten Book is seeing how Hunt can use just about anything to force our gaze toward our certain end. That's an acquired taste in any book, and Hunt doesn't always make it easy in hers. Her own prose, like her father's, at times rambles ... As imperfect as Hunt's book is, though, it also feels like a book that will last as a polestar for writers in years to come. It's a handbook for writing about loss and death that isn't sunk in morality and sentiment. It offers us permission to use the oddest, unlikeliest pieces of ourselves as object lessons in mortality. And it's an example of how to write about the subject with verve and openness.
For many, this excursive narrative will be underwhelming, frustrating, or confusing. Or all three ... Amid the jumble are gems, such as her comparison of covid-19 to David and Goliath ... So, does this all fit together? Yes. The essays are like chapters in a disjointed memoir, but everything is connected, and everyone is related ... Like Borges, Hunt sees the connections between unrelated things and sees everything at once, from all viewpoints. She sees the holes and the connections — holes left by the dead, connections to the living. These connections and holes are the charm and the conundrum of this work. The writing is skillful.
... the moment this book begins to settle comfortably onto one path, it suddenly veers off in a completely different direction ... Without an overarching narrative to hold the many fragments of this work together, it can be challenging to stay invested in the book, despite Hunt’s beautiful writing. But anyone seeking an exceptionally unusual, thought-provoking reading experience will find it here.
Hunt plumbs the depths of human experience in this assemblage of reflections on life’s sweet mystery ... Some other sections of the larger book feel cobbled together—e.g., ruminations on policing and safety, reflections on the pandemic, the author’s attempts to fill the silences of her family history. But Hunt more than compensates for these minor quibbles with her engaging style, vulnerability, and earnest engagement with death and grief, ghosts and art, fear and the unknown—and perhaps the book’s shagginess is merely a reflection of life itself ... A vulnerable, wide-ranging, and at times deeply affecting patchwork of ruminations on the unknown.
