A Review of Table Talk & Second Thoughts by Michael Martone

Joseph Cornell was a shy fellow who wandered the streets of New York looking for little artifacts, broken pieces, and objects he could put in his found art shows or “shadow boxes.” Writing in RA Magazine of London, Deborah Solomon ventured that Cornell was “an unrepentant, meek, monkish, well-read man who never spent a night away from home.”

Our rather humorous Michael Martone borrows seemingly, stylistically from the late artist in his new memoir Table Talk & Second Thoughts (Cornerstone Press, 2025) by giving us glimpses into the contemporary America of literature, across a multi-year spectacular of the fabulous and the long gone.

After reading (and exploring) Martone’s first memoir Michael Martone, I was keen to see what his follow-up might offer. Especially with such company as Mary Gatiskill, William H. Gass, Jay McInerney, James Mitchner, John Barth, Susan Neville, Lorrie Moore, George Plimpton, Jonathan Franzen, and Donald Barthelme.

As a literary biographer, I realized Table Talk & Second Thoughts was just what I needed to get straight again after a long illness.

Martone’s new book is made of glimpses, like Cornell’s, or phenomenal looks into the random from the streets, into his life’s (thus, a memoir) successes, secret failures, memorable encounters, and poignant moments among the bright lights of our chosen-calling in big cities and the primary middles of nowheres, which make up the environs Martone prefers to work within.

Fort Wayne, Indiana, native Martone finds wonder, as Gass oddly titles, “In the heart of the heart of the country.” In his time, Cornell explained, “Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings…”  

What do we seek in these places? Cornell: “Beauty should be shared for it enhances our joys. To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.” Such as “(Untitled) The Hotel Eden,” Cornell’s most lauded shadow box installation, inhabited by a lonely parrot, among other luminous but damaged characters.

In a flash called, “Gasp,” we time travel to an embarrassing moment in 1989 when Gish Jen joins Martone at the Cambridge Y in Central Square. Martone is reading and realizes the final page from his story is missing. What happens next is your mystery to solve. Improvise? Tell the audience? Both? Neither?

These delightful glimpses of authors behind the scenes are here to satisfy those who read barbarically and deep

In Tuscaloosa 2004, Martone asks The Hours author Michael Cunningham if he recalls seeing Martone’s story submission in the Iowa Review slush pile, years back. Yes, Cunningham did. Yes! The story was published. Cunningham said Martone’s story just “stood out.”

Each of the more than 130 little nonfictions stand out here, for various clever reasons, such as Salt Lake City’s “space warp” being: “a vast quilt wrinkled by an invisible rolling gravity.” Then there’s the 1987 “story from New York thingy” of Rona Jaffe, according to Martone: “She told us stories about her time at Radcliffe, moving to New York to work in publishing, and then writing a novel about a Radcliffe woman moving to New York and working in publishing. The Best of Everything. It was made into a movie.”

Then there is William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the zone of uncomfortable belonging, like Martone’s funny Indiana, a place his stories can’t seem to escape. Joyce Carol Oates has been the same way, using her birthplace, Lockport, New York, in many stories and novels. And admitting it during press interviews.

Table Talk & Second Thoughts is about authors Martone has met, and situations that created themselves, along the way. Some meetings have been exciting and productive, while others have been rather bizarre and unforgettable. Hemingway offered a little of the same in A Moveable Feast.

Yet these delightful glimpses of authors behind the scenes are here to satisfy those who read barbarically and deep. We see how the writers are different from those in other callings. They seem to live for the story first, and, other things last. We leave our nightmares on the page, retrieve our voodoo sticks, and see who we might meet in the woods, like Young Goodman Brown.

Then, as if by magic, we’re in a restaurant in Syracuse’s Armory Square in 1995. Table neighbor Joyce Carol Oates is peppering us with questions about the Rail Diesel Car climbing the makeshift platform, off to take students to Lake Onondaga.

But before, in 1992, we’ll be in the same Syracuse territory with Martone, and Robert Stone. During his publicized event, Stone read one paragraph of Outerbridge Reach and then sat down. Thus, tables don’t talk; their temporary inhabitants do.

If only just for the moment.

It’s a singular delight to join Hayden Carruth, C.D. Wright, David St. John, Amanda Urban, and Czeslaw Milosz at literary conferences, readings, at home, out for drinks, at colleges, at lectures, and other places these authors might forget to include in their biographies, or, even though important, may be missed by the best of documentarians.

There are stories here about writers often needing further direction. And how writers’ writers are the only ones who can write us back into the times we lost.