Left Unsaid

In its review of Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days, in May, the New York Times was effusive, praising how the debut braided “memoir with criticism, psychoanalysis with poetry, fiction and even quantum physics.” Dog Days was a testament to LaBarge’s ability to “make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive.”

Peer into the comments section, however, and one finds an interpretive battleground, with a vast number of readers panning both the review and the book as frustratingly opaque, withholding, and “twee.” One reader, invoking the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, maintained that a memoir refusing to clearly name its central event breaks a fundamental promise to confront horror directly, by subjecting it to the clarifying discipline of language. “If you propose to write about it,” they suggested, “put your weight on it.” Others argued that forcing a conventional, novelistic arc onto sheer terror is inherently disingenuous — that...