Joshua Cohen is a thirty-something novelist, journalist and reviewer. He compiles in Attention (sub-titled Dispatches from the Land of Distraction) a book of essays, meditations, diary entries, lists, sketches, case studies and history of ideas. He begins with a portrait of his native Atlantic City, where Donald Trump had a notorious bankruptcy, and continues with an analysis of Bernie Sanders as campaigner. But, only glancingly political, the book is an attempt at inclusive comprehension of the world we live in.
Perhaps that is why Cohen allows himself to run to such length. On the other hand, perhaps it was his publisher who encouraged the extent of his gallimaufry, in which case you may wonder if the author was best-served. Joan Didion is cited in a blurb as Cohen’s precursor. His insights often exceed hers in depth as in breadth, but their number excludes topical coherence. Is this a fault? Yes and no.
You may read the book here and there instead of as a whole. You can jump from Thomas Pynchon to Gustav Mahler to many a famed philosopher or lesser-known creative toiler. You can travel to Baku to seek out the Mountain Jews so numerous among Russia’s new billionaire elite. You can consider the pretensions of Jonathan Franzen as “great American writer” or of Yitzhak Laor as representative Israeli poetic voice. Cohen’s range is vast, intercontinental, just short of the frontier of the incontinent.
He is a voyager in time no less than in space, and he knows his tradition. What is it? Above all, that of a writer/thinker: one who is always weighing up what it means to be a writer/thinker. Cohen has aspects of talmudic scholar, rabbi, schoolteacher and translator. Yet at all times he remains one of us, sitting at our screens, in the vortex of our webs of information, bombarded, distracted.
The eponymous last section of his book deserves to stand as a dissertation on its own. Attention traces the development of alphabet, language and semiotics from Sumerian tablets to Genesis, Thoth, Hermes and Cadmus to Orpheus and on. We brood with St Augustine, fashion syllogisms with Aquinas, visit cabalists in Spain, approach the present day through development of print, theatre, typewriting and more arcane methods of manipulating the word.
If all of this sounds mechanistic, it is not — or not always. Cohen is also concerned with the inner life, variously “spirit” or “soul”, and delves, for example, into similarities between Chasidic lore and Buddhism. He deals with Zionism of a Scholem type — not political — but wears his Judaism lightly as may befit a child of the multicultural alternative Zion of his birth country. That said, he tirelessly sews the fabric of European experience into the garb of our present.
This is frequently an admirable book, if exhausting. In the face of such curiosity and genius, one must indeed pay attention, and attention may be repaid.
That a man of Cohen’s years should be maestro of so much knowledge is not only impressive but a qualification. He has a mind fit to organise chaos, and not a robotic one. Against the despair born of overkill in our cyber era, he is an invaluable observer.
Stoddard Martin is a novelist and critic
