Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity. W. G. Sebald, “Austerlitz.”

Our libraries may say less about us than we imagine. “Agnon’s Library” (2006), by Yuval Yairi. Photograph by Andrea Meislin Gallery

Route 12D, north of Utica, New York, south of Fort Drum and Carthage, runs through poor, shabby countryside. In the unravelled townships, there are trailers and collapsed farmhouses. Here and there, a new silo, shining like a chrome torpedo, suggests a fresh start, or maybe just the arrival of agribusiness. The pall of lost prosperity hangs heavily. Heavily? No, to the skimming driver aiming elsewhere it falls only vaguely.

In Talcottville, an example of that lost prosperity can be seen from the road—a grand, fine limestone house with a white double-storied porch. The house is anomalous, both in its size and in its proximity to the road. But for a long time it must have been the house’s contents that were truly anomalous: a careful, distinguished library of thousands of volumes. For this was Edmund Wilson’s family home, built at the end of the eighteenth century by the Talcotts, one of whom married Wilson’s great-grandfather. It was the place the literary critic most happily returned to in later life, though never uncomplicatedly. In his journal of life in Talcottville, “Upstate,” Wilson expresses his love for the region, while grumbling, in an old man’s crooked jabs, about the bad restaurants and intellectually modest company. “In a sense, it has always been stranded,” he once wrote of the property. It was here that he died, one morning in June, 1972.

I used to drive past Edmund Wilson’s house on my way to Canada, to visit my wife’s parents. Though in apparently reasonable shape, the Wilson home always seemed closed up, forgotten, and in some ways it is the fate of such a house, ignored by a newer road, to seem chronically forgotten. In my mind, I could see into the library, see those shelves and shelves of eloquent, mute books, sunk in themselves like a rotting paper harvest, the ancient, classical authors gesturing in puzzlement to the classical New World place-names of New York State: Rome, Troy, Ithaca, Syracuse.

My father-in-law died last year, and my mother-in-law is ailing, so this summer my wife and I drove up to their house, to empty it for sale. Again we passed the Wilson house, and again I thought about the silent longevity of his books, and the strange incommunicability of that defunct library, uselessly posthumous, once sleeping by the side of this provincial road. I knew that what awaited us in Canada was the puzzle of how to dispose of my father-in-law’s library, a collection of about four thousand books, similarly asleep, in a large Victorian house in the flat, open fields of rural Ontario. We would take perhaps a hundred books back to Boston, but had no room in our house for more. And then what?

François-Michel Messud, my father-in-law, was a complicated, difficult, brilliant man. He was born in France but spent his early childhood nomadically, in Beirut, Istanbul, and Salonica, before the family settled down in Algiers. In the early nineteen-fifties, he came to America, as one of the first Fulbright scholars, and stayed on to do graduate work in Middle Eastern studies. He married Margaret Riches, from Toronto, and the young couple spent their early years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he began a Ph.D. on Turkish politics. For six months of academic field work, they lived in Ankara, an experience they always cherished. (My mother-in-law, whose upbringing had been landlocked and largely Canadian, wrote wide-eyed letters about Turkish life to her parents in Toronto.) Eventually, though, my father-in-law abandoned the Ph.D., and went into business, a decision probably born of academic anxiety and patriarchal masochism. He was not a natural businessman, and retained the instincts of a scholar and traveller. His mind was worldly, with little hospitality toward literature or music. What interested him were societies, tribes, roots, exile, journeys, languages. I found him hard to love, easier to admire, and I rather feared him.

Educated in an austere French environment, a child of the deprivations of the nineteen-thirties and forties (he remembered that Jacques Derrida was in his class in high school in Algiers: “not then a very good pupil”), he could be captious, censorious, bullying. After six in the evening, when cocktails made everything hazardous, one learned to tread carefully, for fear of splashing into an error that might be roughly corrected. Not to know precisely who the Phoenicians were (not to know where they came from and when they flourished); not to know the names of the two most famous mosques in Istanbul, or the history of the civil war in Lebanon, or the ethnic composition of the Balkans; not to recall exactly who said “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” or to flub a French phrase, or to praise something by Bruce Chatwin (“I could do what that little guy does, travelling and writing about his travels,” my father-in-law once told me), was to court swift disdain.

I was grateful not to be his son; his anxious male authority was so different from my reticent father’s that I was alternately impressed and alienated by it. Once, early in my marriage, when I had been living in France for a few months and my ability with the language was improving, we were at dinner, and someone at the table praised me for my increased fluency. Everyone else nicely agreed. “I don’t see why I should praise you yet,” my father-in-law broke in. “It’s a very small improvement and you have a long way to go.” I knew he would say it, hated him for it, agreed with him.

He liked to recount the story of arriving from France, at Amherst College in 1952, and being told by his American roommate that he would never really master English. “I could speak it fluently by Christmas,” he would say. Whether the story was true or not, he spoke perfect English, without a French accent, except for a tendency to pronounce “tongue” as “tong,” and “swan” as if he were saying “swam.” He had the foreigner’s Nabokovian love of exhuming dead puns; was tirelessly amused, for instance, by the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury is officially known as Primate of All England, and therefore “should be called Chief Chimp.”

Tribes and societies interested him because he grew up in a tribe, left it for a society, and belonged to neither. His tribe was French-Algerian: the pieds noirs, the European colonists who began arriving in Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century, and abandoned it en masse at the end of the war for independence, in 1962. Like most pieds noirs, he never returned, after independence, to the country of his childhood, so that Algeria—and indeed a whole world of Francophone North African experience—could be experienced only in the mind, always practically lost. France, the larger home, was an ambiguous pleasure, as for many of the returning colonists. Although his sister settled in Toulon, he never showed much interest in the country, and was refreshingly free of the usual maddening French superiority. Instead, he came to America, where he lived most of his adult life. But he was not an especially eager immigrant, or a willing democrat. Once the early excitements of the Fulbright and graduate school waned, he settled into a familiar European alienation. He lived a lifetime in America, worked here (for a French company), paid his taxes, read The New York Review of Books, bought shirts and underwear at Brooks Brothers, and went to new shows at the Metropolitan Museum, but he was not an American. Increasingly, American society bewildered and irritated him; the vulgarities and democratic banalities that are merely routinely annoying to educated Americans, or are written off as part of the price of dynamic vitality, gnawed at him. He floated on top of American life, privileged, wounded, unmoored.