Chronicle of an Exurbanite

...She pauses in the doorway to improvise a Balanchine number on the theme of departure...

...but he manages to be gallant rather than dyspeptic as he withholds approval...

...These essays also make us privy to a great many esthetic and intimate details about the author-his admiration for his ballet dancer wife, his awe of the handyman, his romanticism...

...Or else-the professional ailment hardest to withstand-the reviewer succumbs to that note of compulsive disdain which seems to catalyze the critical flow, but is not so much the mark of exquisite taste as of atrophying muscles of appreciation...

...At times he views the matter earthily...

...It is too abstract, the stage set for a drama by Beckett...

...In "A Ghost at the Door," the most disconcerting of the essays, an old, unappealing acquaintance from his Greenwich Village days shows up at the writer's home in Connecticut, drenched and tired from following a "command" to walk to Boston...

...An effective columnist has to persist in a single thought until it develops momentum and drama...

...Heartwarming as it is to know these things, they call attention to the one dubious aspect of the elastic column format...

...If a specialist, he swerves demonically away from substance toward some fine metaphysical distinction, implying that he and you need not waste time with the boring essentials...

...He is in his study in the middle of an article when there is a knock at the door...

...Is it, or at least could it become in the wrong hands, part of the talk show, magazine syndrome of instant intimacy with public figures, which tempts us with a kind of specious connection, unearned and therefore hard to profit from...

...Broyard does, and adds to our pleasure in books and people...

...In "Shifting the Weight," a piece about going to see his wife's dancing teacher, he explains his motive: "It came to me with the force of a melancholy revelation that I had borne myself in an unconscious, unchanging manner all through my history...

...Moving fast, almost dancing, he twitched his shoulders in his tight jacket until it sat just right...

...The paternal lilt and unfaltering sense of his own style have syncopated their way into Broyard's writing...

...I'm working!' I shout in a martyred voice, but the door opens to disclose my 11-year-old daughter...

...there was a kind of jazz in my father's movements, a rhythm compounded of economy and flourishes, functional and decorative...

...If wayward, he begins with a flimsy anecdote that comes to him out of nowhere and never arrives at the volume under consideration...

...He has a strong disinclination to get onto intimate terms with this irrational visitor, and is asking us the question: What exactly do we owe other people, and does our liking them enter into it...

...The writer walks a tightrope, trying to be disciplined but not studied, artful but not artificial...

...The sweet exchange of symptoms, the talk about the weather of the self, used to be good for an evening...

...The problem is more generic than actual, because Broyard averts it merely by making a fine distinction between being confessional (sentimental) and being confiding-that is to say, wholesomely, imperturbably frank...

...Bye.' But she doesn't leave...

...Or he may suffer from a didactic bent, so that the review only exists to press an ideological point...

...But no grandma will hold that against him...

...Having already lost her baby fat to ballet and gymnastics, she looks like Yves Saint Laurent's idea of a lumberjack...

...Broyard insists that it does, but the column, haunting, patently troubled, suggests that he may be wrong...

...She did a half-pirouette toward the shelves...

...She is wearing blue jeans tucked into boots, red suspenders and a work shirt...

...In "Working at Home," an essay in his new collection, Broyard unveils the hardships of the literary life...

...It is downright remarkable to come across anyone so open and unself-protective in America, where men are often as inexpressive as clams when the subject is love, sex, money, or politics...

...He may interpret it more realistically, more philosophically, if the hurt comes from them, not us...

...In "The Dream of Competence," an impassioned paean to the village hardware store ("a temple of ingenuity"), the writer decides he "has put the city behind him because he cannot lay his hand on it...

...In the opening essay, a bookstore proprietor recommends Cummings' poetry to a woman in search of a book for a depressed friend: " 'Cummings.' The woman tasted the word, held it on her palate...

...Elsewhere he retrogresses to urban snobbery: Country people "are engaged in an eternal Easter egg hunt for something to respond to, something that will enable us to believe we have not rusticated our sensibilities...

...In "Environments," he is at his serious best worrying whether growing up in the country is really more salutary for his son, sheltering him as it does from developing resourcefulness, tolerance and toughness: "Perhaps life sometimes has to hurt us, to pinch us awake...

...And where would we be, I ask you, without the paranoiac...

...She and my friend, I tell myself, are tourists of the emotions, while my wife and I are natives...

...Perhaps it was in order to expand his small repertoire of gestures and roles that Broyard began to focus so ardently on other people, and to observe them so pictorially in gesture and motion...

...Profiled against them, she appeared in some extraordinary mimesis, to be dressed for a bookstore...

...Mainly because he is natural and self-confident, Anatole Broyard has not fallen prey to these imposter tactics that sell books and readers short...

...In fact, the column form is a very precarious one, too small to sound momentous, yet ambitious to say something of importance...

...Her clothes were in the deep rich tones of fine cloth or buckram bindings and her shorn head showed her brain pate to the assembled authors...

...He keeps rotating city versus country in his loyalties like a man with a wife and mistress, the presence of each alerting him to the delights or the delinquencies of the other...

...The unusual semi-monthly columns gathered here-Autobiographical, informal and apparently under no editorial constraint-look at first like the most luxuriant of newspaper assignments, daubing a group of winsome watercolors with shreds of reverie, patches of nostalgia...

...They are the falling stars and we are the Big Dipper...

...The man at the door asks to spend the night and the writer adamantly puts him off, for reasons of disaffinity...

...He has the knack of finding, as if by accident, those moral hesitations and intuitive sources of judgment that really define us...

...it may be healthier to have the outside world hurt my son...

...While I am not saying that exur-ban life does not have its share of pain, I sometimes suspect that these hurts are too exclusive, too internal, too often originating in the family...

...He takes a clean dive into the content of the book he is reviewing and follows his own line of interest, comfortably curious, just a shade aloof toward old authorities and new directions...

...Women have never seemed more tangible and yet closer to the stuff dreams are made of than in Broyard's phrases...

...Writers& Writing CHRONICLE OF AN EXURBANITE BY ISA KAPP In one of the essay-columns (collected in Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes, Methuen, 209 pp., $9.95) that Anatole Broyard has been writing for the New York Times during the past two years along with his regular book reviews, he tells us that his father came from New Orleans, where every man in the French Quarter was a boulevardier...

...Actually, he happens to be complaining that grandmas no longer exude serenity or "soften the sexual acoustics of the home...

...This very frankness, even more than his intellectual attributes, characterizes all of Broyard's writing (the reviews as well as the essays) and draws readers to it...

...Over the years his criticism has built an imposing bulwark against modern fiction's predilection for the random, inscrutable elements in life...

...A boy of three pedalling a blue plastic bicycle along the sidewalk of 57th Street, a green-eyed woman entering a bookstore, a plumber's visit????some such sliver of reminiscence is all that it takes to conceive these pieces...

...The normal situation in the reviewing business is quite the reverse: The critic stumbles toward his duty unconscious of where he is, who he is, or how he looks...

...He likes to watch himself in relation to others, and in "Love as a Weekend Guest" he quizzically envies an attractive visiting couple suffused with the initial amorousness of their affair...

...Broyard does this with such facility that a mood as evanescent as a New Yorker's sense of loss when he moves to Connecticut aggrandizes into the major philosophical romance of Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes...

...Is there anyone else who notices things...

...Debonair and at ease, he saunters (sometimes struts) through the literary landscape, more for the pleasure of the spectacle than for the obligation of handing down a judgment...

...He can implausibly mix nostalgia and sophistication, lamenting in "Neuroses Are No Fun Anymore," the speed of modern therapy: "With all these cures, conversation is becoming a lost art...

...Keeping a vigilant eye on the figure he cuts, even on occasion carrying a conceit too far, he is clearly the boulevardier of the book review...

...He must have the skill to isolate a concern, a dilemma, that besets him and then turns out to be universal...

...I felt as if I had already posed for my statue, taken up my stance once and for all, and that I would never make a startling or surprising gesture as long as I lived...

...As for "women of a certain age," Broyard's image of them in "There Are No Grandmas Anymore"-mean tennis players, formidable flirts and no slouches at the discotheque-should be enough to assure him a fanatical political constituency...

...It is possible I have been hovering unnecessarily over the wistful, cavalier Broyard, whereas he is just as frequently spry, suave and clever in a strictly literary way, seizing opportunities for easy entree into subjects ("It is raining in Connecticut and all our friends are divorcing"), or yielding to a baroque metaphor...