Alan Sondheim has just published a new book, *Broken Theory*. Internet denizens with literary interests may know Sondheim’s name. He posts to numerous lists daily, I mean daily. This work comes in all shapes and sizes. It represents an unbelievably vast effort to mine the maelstrom of experience. *Broken Theory* seems like both a culmination of that effort, tho without a sense of finishing it, and perhaps a re-envisioning.
I have only just begun reading this book but twenty plus years of familiarity with Sondheim’s work gives me traces to follow. His is a work in which philosophy, psychology, literature, science, history, politics, and more collide and intercept within his experiencing mind. Does that even sound like anything? I declare that it idles.
What caught me as I began to read is that Sondheim has tempered the boundlessness of his writing so that the book can be a book. Think of how a tiny portion of The Mahabharata, The Bhagavad Gita, spun out with centripetal force as a singular work. In the same way *Broken Theory* has its own separated identity. I feel, as I read, a sense of the book as a whole while recognizing that it is but a portion of Sondheim’s enormous task.
Now, I admit that I have not read much of the book. I may not *finish* it. I think linearity doesn’t parse here, just as time seems far less linear than a calendar might suggest. Treat the book like an oracle—I doubt Sondheim has such an intention—and see what wildness, what mystery, what glint appears.
