Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz review – reflections on grief and falling in love | Books

Lost & Found, as befits a book about contrasts, is something of a hybrid. On the one hand, it is a memoir of two shattering events that took place almost simultaneously in Kathryn Schulz’s life: the death of her much-loved 74-year-old father, and her falling in love, in middle age, with a woman she calls C. It also veers between two distinct modes: the personal, where Schulz relates these events in affecting prose; and the more detached, essayistic style that will be familiar to readers of her Pulitzer-winning work de ella in the new yorker.

After establishing the fact of her father’s death in the book’s opening, Schulz takes the reader on a series of long, impersonal digressions on the subject of loss in general: “Phone chargers, umbrellas, earrings, scarves, passports, headphones, musical instruments, Christmas ornaments, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip … the range and quantity of things we lose is staggering.” She is such a good writer of nonfiction that she is never less than shrewd and entertaining company, dispensing maxims such as “In the microdrama of loss, we are nearly always both villain and victim,” and providing thoughtful readings of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art , in which the narrator contemplates “the art of losing.”

But the narrative truly comes alive when she contemplates her father’s story. She sees his incurable habit of losing things as “the comic-opera version of the series of losses that shaped his childhood of him… one that was defined by an extraordinary degree by loss”. Her father’s mother was the youngest of 11 children living in a shtetl outside Łódź in the late 1930s, and, since her family was too large and too poor to survive the war together, “by a private calculus unimaginable to me”, writes Schulz, she was designated as the only one to be sent away to safety, to Tel Aviv. Her son de ella was born there, and at a certain point she received news that almost everybody back home had died. By 1954, visas for the two of them had been secured for the US.

The book’s second section describes Schulz’s surprise at finding a life partner after years of cherishing a bookish kind of solitude. Here, her tendency to digress might be seen as a defense against cloying sentimentality. If so, she needn’t have worried. When she comes to describe meeting C (after 30 pages of philosophising and psychologising on the subject of “finding”) she writes beautifully about falling in love: “Everything that wasn’t her – the house around us, the rest of the world, the passage of time, the past and the future – retreated from awareness.”

But Schulz’s unusual method – part‑essay, part-memoir – comes into its own in the book’s final third. This begins with a description of a meteor hitting Earth during the Eocene period and ends, 35m years later, on a “beautiful May afternoon” with Kathryn’s marriage to C. There follows a fascinating disquisition on how the ampersand symbol began to fall out of fashion as the final letter of the English alphabet early in the 19th century, which provides Schulz with an opportunity to expound on the paradoxical nature of life: “In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, ‘Life is and.’ He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or. We live with both at once, with many things at once – everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.”

In these passages, Schulz’s prose almost rises to the level of Nietzsche at his most wise and humane, or William James. When, in the final pages Schulz reveals she and C are expecting a baby, her reflections of her on time, loss and mortality take on an even greater resonance. “We are here to keep watch,” she concludes, “not to keep.”