What's the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long is, in many ways, a
kaleidoscopic chronicle of this ongoing search. By turns elegiac,
humorous, sad, joyful, angry -and often many of these at once- this book
of extremely short prose reflections entertains an abiding question for
Lea: to what extent does "my" version of what happens in this life and
in the world at large coincide with some imagined "real" version? If the
author had an opinionated, positive answer to such a question when
young, life has imposed a degree of humility upon him in older age,
whether he wants it or not. What's the Story? is less notable, then, for
the conclusions it reaches at any given point than for its compelling
witness to what poet Wallace Stevens called "the mind in the act of
finding what will suffice."