Let’s start at the end. Memoirs can have many motivations: the impulse to confess; the need to validate, to come to terms with, to pin down and make manageable the welter of experience. And though Sven Birkerts’s coming-of-age narrative suggests, at various points, the presence of all these drives, in the end one gets the impression that the main impetus behind My Sky Blue Trades is the desire to mold the stuff of one’s life into literature. When he was in his late 20s, floundering with no job prospects, after a protracted affair that ended unhappily, Birkerts decided to enter a novella-writing competition. He’d done some scribbling before but had never made the plunge into serious pursuit; still, he was in love with the idea of being a writer, and that’s not an uncommon beginning. " I did not write and I did not write, " he says of his period of gestation, " and it was still all on the way to being a writer. The dream of the vocation was purer without the stain of faltering expressions on the page. "

And so he crosses over and finds that, even though the experience is akin to playing " four-dimensional chess, " he has a knack. Or so he thinks. His fictional effort grows with his growing approval, and it’s not until it’s completed and he reads it aloud to a couple of friends that he realizes it’s ghastly. The nexus of character and conflict that seemed so wondrously captured in the heat of creation reveals itself to be caught in a form of expression that’s " mawkish and overblown. " His sad love affair has resisted the metamorphosis into fiction and has become more like a " long aggrieved letter. " But there’s a happy ending, and soon after that fiasco he has a first success with an appreciative essay on the then (late ’70s) neglected Robert Musil. He will become a lauded literary critic and cultural commentator, best known as the author of The Gutenberg Elegies. And then, 20 some years after the failed novella, the true story that he couldn’t forge into fiction will emerge as a significant part of My Sky Blue Trades, and readers will be grateful because they’ve been spared yet another tediously artful first fiction, receiving instead something graceful, engaging, and lightly melancholic.

Birkerts’s shaping experience was growing up as a first-generation Latvian-American in an upper-class Detroit suburb and hating what he perceived as his outsider status: " As a child who wanted to be above all a white-bread American, I professed an aversion to all things Latvian. . . . I wanted to be rid of that hump of pastness that I carried and other kids did not. I wanted the very ‘lightness of being’ that Milan Kundera disparages in his novel — and I did not even come close. " Instead he remains " something recalcitrant inserted into a host tissue, a grain of resistance. " His father, an architect, was a strict disciplinarian and a source of much familial tension: " How could I ever tell my father this — I never have — that the erratic flaring of his moods, his incessant swerves in and out of temper, created the very weather of home and are now part of the core deposit of my childhood? "

Birkerts’s narrative is both anecdotal and progressive, reaching back to his grandparents in Riga, moving forward through his first tentative rebellions as he ventures, in the late ’60s, from the suburbs to Detroit’s notorious Cass Corridor (where I was living at the same time, and at roughly the same age — we might have rubbed shoulders at Alvin’s Finer Deli, the local boho headquarters) and on to the first girlfriend in Ann Arbor, the first serious affair in Maine, the first publication in Boston. It’s a decidedly non-juicy memoir — no violence, no incest — of a fairly ordinary life told with an agreeable combination of the naturally rendered and the poetically heightened, full of the sort of intriguingly inexplicable characters that one so often finds outside of fiction. Once again, as with his doomed novella, Birkerts has attempted to create something artful and resonant out of personal memory. And this time he’s pulled it off.