The Forms of Michael Field by LeeAnne M. Richardson (review)

muddles our familiar sense of unified agency. A subject leading and a subject being led: who is doing the living? The fragmented image is further troubled by the plurality Miller postulates, namely, that one could have led many lives (but, alas, lives one). Moreover, we are haunted by the suggestion that the singular life we are living is not being sufficiently well lived—or is, in a Thoreauvian sense, “unlived” (xvi). “When I described my project to a friend,” Miller confides, “he said, ‘Ah—YOLO + FOMO’” (162). It is an algorithm that fits the times, no doubt, and a tidy condensation, yet it may skirt the shades of difference between “unled” (possible but not taken) and “unlived” (actual but not fulfilled). Those familiar with work on unled lives by Gary Saul Morson, Michael André Bernstein, Hilary Dannenberg, Catherine Gallagher, and perhaps most spiritually aligned, Adam Phillips and James Wood, should find Miller’s accomplished pastiche of value. In addition to his knowing selection and assembly of examples (a veritable commonplace book of unled lives), Miller is a profoundly gifted close reader—someone whose company one would like to keep, and return to again and again. David LaRocca Cornell University