The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

by Suzannah Lessard

This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place, and reimagining our American landscape



Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular talent to combine this profound book-length mosaic—a blend of historical travelogue, reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique
genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of cultural reinvention.



This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place and reimagining the world in a time of transition. Whether it be climate change altering the meaning of nature, or digital communications altering the nature of work, the effects of global enclosure on the meaning of place are panoramic, infiltrative, inescapable. No one will finish this book, this journey, without having their ideas of living and settling in their surroundings profoundly enriched.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Environment, History, Architecture, Geography, Nature

320 pages, Hardcover

Published March 12, 2019

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happy pub day to The Absent Hand: Reimagining our American Landscape by Suzannah Lessard!

Lessard's literary essays explore the landscapes of the modern United States of America - their history, their context. Describing places she knows best - where she's lived, and those places where she frequently travels - she speaks of their changes over time. Some of the highlights for me were her discussions of the spaces where we 'bide time' - the liminality of hotel and airport locations. Sweeping histories of urban settings, suburban sprawl, and rural renaissance and deaths. Land and architectural preservation and politics, shopping malls rise and fall, plantations and 'heritage' sites, urban housing projects, landfills/dumps.

Contemplative, sometimes (lovingly) curmudgeonly - she rants a little like an auntie about peoples' casual clothing choices and the way things used to be, etc - Lessard's book is about transitions that happen before our eyes in our own physical and mental landscapes.

As someone who is already into 'landscapes', she brought some new observations and ways of thinking.

My only criticism is that the essays are east coast-centric. She ventures west of the Mississippi only once for an essay on Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (NM ❤️ my childhood home!), and leaves swaths of American land unobserved with her critical eye. I would have liked some more discussion on the Midwest, the Rockies, the west coast and Alaska and Hawaii too... Yet, others have done that - Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez come to mind, and they're some of my favorite writers of all time.

Thank you to @counterpointpress for sending this ARC.

[David Wineberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Suzannah Lessard believes there is a “deep coherence between our landscapes and the evolving human condition”. In The Absent Hand, she attempts to link the two, mostly by criticizing every kind of habitation available in the USA, from farmhouses to apartments, townhomes to McMansions, ante-bellum homes and even hotel rooms.

She relies mostly on her own experience, because she has moved house quite a bit. So there are evaluations and reminiscences of life in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, Georgetown and Rensselaerville, NY, an intersection between the Catskills and the Adirondacks.

She devotes the most legalistically detailed descriptions to the evil suburbs, with their edge cities and New Urbanist designs. The disneyfication of purpose-built towns comes in for justified criticism as well. There is a tour of the King of Prussia Mall, which Lessard does not like (same for all malls) any more after her tour than before. There is also a lot of history around the development of the mortgage and its associated redlining, which ensured segregation, and that cities would deteriorate and hollow out.

Oddly, there is no discussion of cookie-cutter Levittowns in the northeast. Nor does she delve into the simple truth that there are now well over 300 million Americans, all of whom want their own space. Things simply cannot be the pastoral way they were when the population was half a million. 300 million means more rules and regulations, housing speculation, zoning, planning, endless bickering and whole new developments where once there was a happy balance of nature. Our landscapes reflect our numbers as much as the human condition.

The greatest detail in the book is Lessard’s memory of ancillaries. Colors of walls, cleanliness, the blond desk in her hotel room, pastoral fields of various wildflowers, and old houses and mills in her village in upstate New York. Her impressions of the importance of landscaping on the human condition are far more vague, broad and never definitive.

She’s not big on change, and waxes nostalgic on everything from farm fields to a boy behind the counter at a long-disappeared deli in Maryland. Still, she ends by saying she hopes for imaginative alternatives going forward. She is not convincing in that.

The absent hand of the title appears to be the federal government, which does not direct development or define objectives. Lessard claims several times the USA is unique in the world in this way, but it’s the same next door in Canada, as well as in China, where all such decisions are local (much to the frustration of the central government). Greece doesn’t even keep a land registry, let alone nationwide planning or policy. I must have missed something, because the USA does not seem unique in the lack of national land management to me.

Lessard slips in and out of memoir to refer to novels or films, informing her notion of the importance of landscapes. I don’t think anyone doubts their importance and variety. What I doubt is that it is worth a book.

At best, The Absent Hand is a very personal memoir, beefed up with tours of cities and suburbs she visited - to beef it up. For example, she is very critical of Natchez as a living ante bellum museum. Overall, as a personal memoir it has some merit for her fans, but as a thought-provoking work, The Absent Hand fails.

David Wineberg

[Mei · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Over the years, the housekeeping staff at the Towson Sheraton has changed: it consists now mainly of immigrants from cultures entirely unlike our own.” This sentence at the end of Lessard’s book perfectly encapsulates her themes and her attitudes. It’s a genteel book written for a New Yorker audience.

[Kate Belt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lessard draws some interesting connections between untouched places and human interactions with them. Very wordy, but interesting and worth the time to read.

[Gretchen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stopped about halfway through. Expected this to be exactly the kind of book about place and space that speaks to me. At first I enjoyed it, but I found Lessard somehow more dour and idiosyncratic than made for enjoyable reading, as well as a touch self-righteous. Less compelling than Dillard, Kingsolver, Robinson, and other such voices I've appreciated in the past.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been searching for this book and an author who could eloquently bring together many of my thoughts how cities and towns evolve. It is a series of connected essays on sense of place. Many of the chapters and examples were places that I am very familiar. Like Towson, MD as the faceless and generic town on the outskirts of Baltimore. The chapter, The Corporation in the Woods, referred to the I. M. Pei campus for IBM in Westchester/Purchase, NY. I remember the imposing white building on the top of the hill with very subtle Asian influence. I also remember the surrounding woods. There is a human need to be connected to place – but what happens when everywhere we visit becomes generic – where we can’t tell where we are because every strip mall looks the same? Worse, what if architects tried to create a sense of a unique place but without any context – like Disney’s Celebration development? The author admits this troubles her, but comes to the point that this is progress. And Americans with our constant change and lack of fixed ties to a location, maybe in the forefront of this inevitable but lamentable change. The book is a mix of philosophy, travelogue, and urban development history which the author weaves together.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Skimmed so quickly. Did not like at all. Just personal essays and ramblings.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lessard thinks about the things that I think about. This feels like a book written for me, possibly me alone, since I can't imagine anyone else enjoying this book about "places" as much as I did.

[Lloyd Fassett]

4/27/19 sounds great... American values reflected in it design and non-design. Found it in the WSJ:

‘The Absent Hand’ Review: Book of Revelations https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-abse...

[Miranda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it to be a classist approach to understanding landscapes. She writes in an effort to emerge herself in places and understand their changing nature; however she does so while leaving out the role of people in those places and changing landscapes. I find her perspectives to be more of judgment of the people in those places and less of compassion in understanding their roles. She fails to embrace that landscapes are changing based on social needs or to see the things happening around her. Lessard is aghast at the women watching television in a garden next door to her when she arrives home. Obviously she demands quiet within her own garden through passive aggressive requests. Again and again she centers much of the environments around her own needs. She speaks consistently of individuals of races that are not her own in negative forms, packing in the micro-aggressions. At one point she refers to a woman in a food pantry as a “hyperactive black woman.” She barely touches on the true social concerns at hand regarding the neighborhood, food pantry and other issues she only alludes to. She clicks her tongue at young people or others who do not see things her way. She withstands curiousity for assumptions. The run-on sentences, while striving for romanticism, is poor writing. I hoped for more!

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas and discussion of familiar places but I was distracted -- and not in a good way -- by the personality of the author.

[Martyn Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a human book, written by a person encountering and reflecting on American landscapes. The places examined in the book aren’t particularly unique, and no doubt the same book could have been written with a quite different set of place choices. The interpretive power of the book comes from the willingness to engage with typical places: fields, malls, city streets, airports, and sprawling suburbs.
Suzannah Lessard isn’t writing as an academic, with arguments built upon an established theoretical vocabulary. She’s not extending the work of other writers within a defined discipline. She introduces previous writers who have thought about these places, but she doesn’t hesitate to portray the world as it appears to her eyes. It’s not that she tells us all about her life and family—this is by no means a memoir—but she shows enough that we’re able to see how her questions arose from personal experience. Academic writing often has something like an allergy when it comes to divulging a personal point of view, but Lessard maintains the voice of a personal essayist.
At one point Lessard mentions that she avoids malls “unless in explorer mode”—and I’m pretty sure people who know me would recognize that same mode of being in a place. She doesn’t write as an expert in architecture or in the history of a particular development; her method is both simpler and more complex: she reflects on how a landscape comes to mean something to an actual person in that place. Since I have an ongoing photo-based project on global sacred places, I kept thinking about how photos would often more effectively communicate these arguments, and how I would like to see these places. But that’s another way of saying I found myself easily thinking along with her.
Lessard introduces two sets of concepts that weave in an out of the book’s sections. First is the “hand of work,” a phrase Lessard uses to refer to the underlying economic reality of a place. In the broadest sense, American landscapes reflect an agrarian, industrial, or technological work foundation. Often vestiges of the agrarian continued on into the industrial, and both might still be present in landscapes structured by the tech economy. The landscape might remain the same, but it’s meaning changes with the flow of money.
The second set of concepts has to do with the haunting presence of slavery and the threat of nuclear annihilation. These are two exceptional facts about America: a foundation in slavery and the actual use of an atomic weapon. Lessard describes how empty fields call to mind Civil War battlefields and how suburban sprawl was in part a scheme to lessen mass casualties in a nuclear exchange. Our landscape often reflects these submerged facts.
Lessard refuses to end the book quietly, and in the last few pages comes a passionate discussion about the need for renewal through some form of re-imagined transcendence. Having followed Lessard to this point, it’s clear that landscape will be a part of this renewal. Solving the placelessness of our contemporary space is an important part of re-imagining our communal life.

[Jeanne Look · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I understood the reality of global collapsed space all at once because I remember how, that very day, encountering someone who had not yet been on the internet, I was acutely aware of what they didn't know.....their innocence."

It is this awareness of a loss of innocence which I find to be one of the compelling forces behind Suzannah Lessard's meditations on place in Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape. Suzannah Lessard writes with a painter's eye, a philosopher's mind and a poet's tongue about the revolutionary change which the enclosed space of the internet has foisted upon our worldwide culture, and the need to reinvent ourselves as a result.

She moves onto examine spaces she calls "atopias" shaped by Cold War policy, The Depression, the legacy of slavery, racist housing policies, nuclear armament and leading to "the disappearance of landscape itself as we had known it."

After the moon landing, seeing ourselves from that perspective, as a little blue marble floating in dense space, made us "lose our footing" and Lessard posits that we now need "faith in life itself."

Living in the enclosed space of the internet, and having lost "landscape as we had known it", and our footing in the universe, Lessard asserts that we need "the imaginative creativity necessary for political reinvention" and that "The human imagination is in its early days of finding itself, in which we know little, in which all is to be discovered."

[Paul Henry · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is neither fiction or nonfiction, rather a long essay. I made it to the third chapter, in which the author writes about Gettysburg. The chapter is replete with historical errors regarding the battle. She writes that the north suffered 23,000 men killed in action. Wrong. Each side suffered roughly 3,000 killed in action, and roughly 25,000 casualties including wounded, captured, and missing in action. This is unbelievable. A five minute session on Wikipedia would have set her, or her editor, straight on the numbers. She refers to the Winchester rifle at Gettysburg. The Winchester Company was formed in 1866, after the war. The rifle she refers to was called the Henry repeater during the war, named after its designer Benjamin Tyler Henry. The Winchester rifle, made famous out west, was based on the same design. She calls it a semi automatic weapon. Wrong. It was lever action. The first semi automatic rifle in general use in the Army, if I'm not mistaken, was the M1 during World War II. I could go on, but you get my point. Why keep reading something so footloose with the facts. Not recommended.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complicated book and subject - I thought that at first this book was a review of places visited but in the middle I finally caught the gist of this book - changes in the American landscape and most of those not for the good. Her chapter on King of Prussia, Pennsylvania really resonated with me as we visited this place and could not locate the village - all we found was a large sprawling shopping center and lots of traffic. We never did find the place and she persisted and found a decrepit inn that was once was the village of King of Prussia. And she addresses the issue of not being able to go “ back home” because the home place that you remember is no longer there but has disappeared into the mists of time and has morphed into a new unrecognizable place. She writes about the ghost appearance of “edge” cities which I have found and then wondered how this building of great proportions came to be in the middle of nowhere. Wordy writing but worth pursuing to the end.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful reflection on human created landscapes and their relationship with natural areas. She acknowledges how easy it is to ridicule or abhor change but also how complex the consequences of change can be. One persons suburban Truman Show is another person’s attempt to provide attractive, community housing. The book acknowledges that change is both hard and inevitable and suggests that perhaps we can and will learn how to be better participants with the american landscape that recognizes the inevitability of economic development while integrating environmental protections and social justice.

[Chris Leuchtenburg · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a thoroughly analytical thinker, I suppose that it is good for me to read an author who thinks so differently. Lessards narrative about landscapes appears to be more associative than analytical. That seems to allow her the freedom to jump from topic to topic in the middle of long, long paragraphs. I found her idea that we should consider rural and urban landscapes as a unit thought provoking, but gradually I found the book to be tedious. This is an idiosyncratic memoir, with many personal reflections. For instance, she returns over and over to nuclear weapons for some reason.

[John Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book on place and landscape, as Suzannah Lessard explores her own history and that of the US, as she looks at landscapes she knows well and some that draw her out beyond her own world. She writes about rural, urban, and suburban landscapes through time and tries to understand some of the current landscapes that seem to have no connection to place. A thoughtful book that is hard to categorize.

[Alisia Barringer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book about landscapes and place, eccentric and intense and focused, brimming with passion and intriguing in its abstraction and very intimate and personal journeys of mind; the author shows us specific evocative places, a test site of an atomic bomb, a civil war battlefield, a small town where she has cabin, and neighborhoods of New York City...the author takes us along on her personal journey, and the search is beautiful and the book is beautifully written.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot to think about how our lives change over the years and where we’ll be in the future. Not a book one picks up and reads through quickly. Each part must be digested. I read and then put it aside before returning and eventually finishing this book.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t read this completely, but in bits and pieces. She’s thoughtful and able to describe many of the evolutions of place we’ve experienced.

[Bruce · Rating 2 out of 5]

Landscape interpretation?

[Cristy]

Reading Women Challenge #3: a book about the environment.

[Librarian Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part intriguing and part rambling...I don't know, maybe I read it at the wrong time. I think I might come back to this. I love the idea and the question...just wasn't it for me.

[Adam Cohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone with a strong sense of topophilia will relate to this book. Read in my built environment class junior year of college

[Tyler J Hinds · Rating 3 out of 5]

6.9