Reading the book is similar to spending all night talking with a friend, as a conversation of such intimacy may mean you learn more than you want ... Some may criticize Ball's response to Levé, as it isn't wholly original and lacks some of Levé's transgressive power, but perhaps it's best to think of this as one side of a conversation, rather than a monologue. And I, for one, wish more memoir were so honest about its influences ... an antidote to a genre that has become overly codified ... Released from the contract of high-stakes tragedy, Ball provides an authentic look at what life is really like and offers the reader a way to encounter life outside the parameters that society, and narrative convention, would impose on it. If everything is equally important, then we must live life moment to moment, as if each portion of our day has the same opportunity for value as any other.

Ball turns the autobiography on its head ... Biographic traditionalists may find this technique disjointed (several passages read like random lists) but as a whole, Ball makes compelling work of it, slabbing the matter of his life together like a Dadaist sculptor. His writing is straightforward and conversational ... An unconventional memoir that speaks to the power of elusiveness. Recommended.

... a pointillism of sorts, a scatter plot of the psyche. The range of declaration is elastic, encompassing both trivialities and profundities ... The pleasure, here, is in errancy and velocity. This ad hoc method of mapping the self has a pleasant lightening effect, converting everything it touches into trivia ... In general, Levé’s Autoportrait is fleeter, more imagistic, whereas Ball’s text leans into cold wonder, flirting with a Francis Ponge-like poetry of the mundane and highlighting his predilection for the absurd, the diffuse, the simply odd ... If Levé’s razorish pensées can feel pristine, a virtuosic display of self-knowledge, a sense of freshness and wide-eyed discovery adds a puckish instability to Ball’s musings ... Occasionally, Ball’s sentences germinate, leafing out along singular boughs, though even when extended reflections form, they leave us stranded just shy of ‘the point of total explanation’ he claims to abhor. Instead, what remains is a cold combustion, an increase of shadows – which, admittedly, isn’t a bad thing. Even if what we’re supposedly being given in Autoportrait is a self-portrait, the fragmented character of the text bathes the proceedings in a performative light. Much of the strange delight of reading this book is found in teasing out the precise nature of Ball’s writerly persona, variously warm and cold, aloof and sincere ... The tilted meta-flâneurism of the text is Robert Walser-like in spirit, as is the wry dreaminess at the root of Autoportrait, the sense that what is being presented in the text is at once deathly serious and of no import at all...Which is maybe what lends Autoportrait, despite its misty aporias, a startling feeling of fullness ... a mystery that begets more mysteries – which is to say, something like life itself.

... challenging ... Who is Jesse Ball? The answers come fast and weird in this thoughtful, bleak, impressionistic new work, a slim but powerful homage to French photographer Edouard Leve’s 2005 memoir ... There is no doubting what Ball is capable of under less constrained circumstances ... Ball has shown himself to be a master stylist, among his generation’s most ambitious and provocative, with big ideas and a proud heart to match. But can a book as blunt and angular (and at times repugnant) as Autoportrait ultimately deliver the same kind of confidence and simplicity? ... At times Ball can come off as a bit of a monster ... There is a dark wit embedded in such candor, a monster that maybe lurks inside all of us. In more vulnerable moments, it feels like trauma ... The collisions of severe, unvarnished facts start to build a larger idea about how we live — or how we fail to live fully ... There are also lighter moments, touches of humor or even epiphany ... bears a trace of self-aware arrogance...the book feels least interesting when this particular strain of Ball’s personality comes to the fore...Elsewhere it just sounds like oblivious white privilege ... And yet, buried deep, the reason the book is worth studying, is its central tension. It turns out that not only has Ball always felt antisocial, uncomfortable about his body, and unsure of what life should look like. It’s also true that, at 39, award-winning, tenured and beloved, he still doesn’t feel hopeful about how much even an almost perfect sentence can accomplish ... For all his formal risk-taking and most peculiar stylistic choices, it probably says something that the most tantalizing moment in Autoportrait may be the one containing the seedlings of a plot ... This a brave book that is also a little bit insane. There is strength in it, and cleverness and nearly unbearable honesty, yet the enduring aftertaste of such gristly tidbits produces little more than an intense desire to give Ball a big hug.

... elusiveness is a tricky business; it has to serve a point. For Mr. Ball, that point is finding a bridge between writer and reader. If he is not always as raw as Levé in his disclosures, he is revealing in his own way. 'T]he text,' he urges, 'should overflow its borders.' And in his Autoportrait, much like the book that is its inspiration, that is what it does.

... slender and innovative ... Though his writing implies a stream-of-consciousness approach, it may not be a coincidence that Ball, a self-identified absurdist, often recounts violence or tragedy, then swiftly changes the subject ... While jarring, such punches mimic the ruthlessness of life. It’s a somewhat depressive affair, but Ball skillfully molds it into a rich self-portrait that evokes wonder at odd passions (cooking with strangely named spices, drawings of dead babies) and delightfully idiosyncratic opinions.

While the author’s previous books challenge literary conventions in dreamy, riddling prose, this book plays it straight. With mechanical simplicity, Ball composes his self-portrait with terse, confessional fragments rattled off in a trancelike deadpan. They quickly jump among ideas and, without paragraph breaks, amass into a tower of personal facts and reflections ... Despite its rigidity, the narrative is enjoyably personable and curiously mundane. Ball invites readers into a meditative engagement with the text and suggests that perhaps the best way to understand a person is to sift through their mental clutter. Koan-like moments hum throughout ... A hypnotic personal reflection penned with clockwork discipline.