The questions that interest him most — “Why is it so difficult to enjoy not getting it?” “Is there someone ordering us around in our minds to try to get it?” — are purposefully broad, because the content of the “it” is less important than the form of the question. “It” is whatever “it” means to the reader at the moment: a raise, a joke, a girlfriend, a poem. As it happens, the idea of “getting away with it” involves two “it”s: first, the object of desire; and second, not paying the penalty. “Getting away with it” is a contemporary expression yet a fundamentally conservative impulse. The cheater remains “pro law and order,” because for someone to get away with something, the laws must remain in place, the cheater darting beyond its sights, unpunished by authority or his own guilt. I’m reminded of those characters we’ve seen much of lately, in the dramas of the financial crisis, searching for loopholes to slip through, as if external punishment were the only penalty that mattered.

Phillips continued in that Bomb interview to express his hope for “a world in which there is less art and better relationships. . . . The only game in town is improving the quality of people’s relationships. Everything is about group life, and there’s no life without group life.” This seems indicative of how he wants his essays to function: less like art-objects (beautiful, stable things to be contemplated at a distance) than a training ground for how we might relate differently to the world and one another through how we relate to the text. Modeling relations in a safe environment is what many therapies do; it’s fascinating to see it work in a book.

One wonders if we should not be trying to “get” these essays at all, but rather let our single-mindedness about what we want from them — a perfect solution to our frustrations? — loosen amid the paradoxes Phillips presents. That’s good practice for learning to do things with other people (and our desires) besides trying to “get” them. Although we’ve been educated to want to get it, there are forgotten pleasures in not getting it, as when we were infants and didn’t get the point of what the adults were saying: “Living as if missing the point — having the courage of one’s naïvety — could also be a point.”

At the end of the collection, Phillips discusses the relationship among theater, madness and the mad characters on stage. “When the mad are offered another audience” — in the arena of theater, that audience is us — “it is like their being offered another kind of hope,” the sort of hope that comes when people can “talk at length in their own way, be listened to and, if need be, killed, and yet not really die.”

With Phillips, we feel our wished-for satisfactions (our madness?) listened to and killed, and yet not really die. And he offers us another kind of hope too — not the consumerist one, that all our dreams may come true, but the hope that our frustrations might lead us out of the fantasy world in our minds and into an engagement with what is. After all, “the only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”