Really lovely essay from Blake Smith that also happens to be a review of the book:
Far From Respectable is a book about the political risks of, and political threats to, the pleasure of beauty—and Oppenheimer tenderly reveals his own pleasure in reading (and over the course of time, befriending) Hickey. As he recounts his subject’s life and contemporary relevance, Oppenheimer stages his own enjoyment of Hickey with such lucid warmth that he seems to substantiate Hickey’s insistence that our enjoyment of art entangles us in other human loves. The last pages of Far From Respectable, for example, present Oppenheimer and his wife together in bed, reading with rapture from the same page of Hickey. Oppenheimer thus pulls off what Hickey elsewhere calls “the most elegant rhetorical maneuver available to writers … to do in the doing what he describes in the writing,” to share in aesthetic pleasure simply by talking about sharing it. Far From Respectable succeeds in proving, through its reader’s own pleasure, the truth of Hickey’s vision of art as an experience that opens the self toward others. As he says of Hickey’s work, Oppenheimer could say of his own: It is “less an argument … than a series of literary efforts to conjure up … visions, only briefly realizable if at all, of life as we would like it to be and of art as it occasionally can be.”