Like all of us these days, Jared Joseph has scorched earth. I am here to write a book review and have just realized that there may be no actual book for it to be about.

The Table of Contents for A Book About Myself Called Hell lists three sections: “Preface to a Book;” “Critical Commentary about a Book;” and “Multiple Choice Questions.” The book of this book’s title has conscientiously refused to manifest. This may be a way of saying: Hell, like my Self, is here to stay. Why write that down? Just look around.

That’s one way Joseph feels like answering “why modern comedians are so melancholy,” as he puts it elsewhere, in an early essay providing historical-cultural context for Dante’s Divine Comedy, the text from which this bookish text pulls some of its considerable power. The rest comes from Joseph’s relentless allusiveness and guileless delicacy of tone. Which is not to suggest that its contents are for the faint of heart! Joseph’s initial gesture of elision and his subsequent present-but-not-accounted-for language together formally enact the postmodern meme of our present moment, begging you to “read the room.”

Instead of calling it a room, I am going to call A Book About Myself Called Hell a book, because that is what it calls itself, and it seems important to respect this. Reading this book worked things out of me. I felt unsexy during this exercise. I felt what we call “seen.” This writing evoked the fatigue of aloneness — two? three? years of psycho-emotional quarantine — and wrung it partly out. I also felt sad, sensing I was connected to something as sad as myself, but then, acknowledgment of this connection gave a confusing leap like happiness; and I was also laughing, in a smarting way.

The whole thing’s thrilling: Joseph’s language is taut and so impatiently intelligent that it seems angry. “‘Hear Truth,’ where nothing shines at all,” he writes in Canto IV. “In the first circumference of hell it’s all the unbaptized babes who cannot crawl to heaven. It’s strange that the eternal god punishes for the sin of anachronism those who lived BC, but that is WWJD i guess. In this circumference no one moves, they have become an image, the anteroom to where nothing shines at all.” He sticks it there. Grief exposes the sources of anger and releases its energy. Accessing, then harnessing emotional power, however circumambulatory, however misleadingly cerebral — the spirals of linguistic ploys, plots, twists — is the prize of these rambles.

It’s a tender epic, weirdly tender: the author pities his own perceptions of his mind, his body, and his world. His concern for this mysterious and indivisible trinity, itself pitiable, is analogous to Dante’s voyeuristic heartache for Francesca and Paolo. All genuine tenderness has this natural element of the weird. Detaching from the vulnerability of the human by recognizing and accepting your deep attachment to it — that’s the alchemical movement of this book. This Hell talks you into submission, at which point everyone feels sufficiently safe (or anarchic) to reveal what’s really bothering them.

You are going to want to read this book more slowly than it wants you to, so live through it at least twice: first, pretty fast, the way it asks to be read, and again, paying homage to its parent poetries. Try to slow down, to regulate your nervous system enough that you can start to understand just what it is that thaws inside the dark pit of this work, which is after all, only and ultimately, ourselves.

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