In his engaging, intelligent, and beautifully written collection of essays, Bachelorhood, Phillip Lopate sets out to explore the condition of those who have elected to be single…. In pieces ranging from the slight and delightful to an original exploration of bachelorhood as the basis for a literary genre, Lopate uses a rueful civilized persona, a narrator who is always ironic, but who "is inevitably less than the writer." It is this emotional distance between persona and author, both called Phillip Lopate, that gives the book a disquieting and sometimes uncomfortable tone.

In "My Drawer," the persona sets out to sketch the image of his sensibility, detailing his wryness, sensitivity, and eccentricity. Examining the mementos he cannot discard—old Bambu cigarette papers, DUMP LBJ and IMPEACH NIXON buttons, a brown velvet bow tie—which sort of remind him of a Joseph Cornell box, Lopate establishes with a true writer's...