Elsewhere and a Pair of Novels

by Weston Cutter

1) The buzz lately seemingly everywhere’s been about D’Agata and Fingal’s Lifespan of a Fact. The good thing is: it’s a book well deserving of lots of buzz. The bad thing is: every goddamn thing that’s written about this book seems wildly off the mark. Bullshittilly bad recent NYTimes stuff here and here, and my thoughts on the thing here at the Kenyon Review blog, plus, bonus, here’s an interview with Fingal and D’Agata about the book. If you give a shit about books, keep your fingers crossed that this one starts getting talked about in adult, interesting ways and unlike it’s being talked about presently (which, obviously, are infantile, dull ways).

2) Other recent Kenyon stuff here and here.

3) I’ve got a stack of books to review and the next two weeks will hopefully see them all covered, so let’s begin.

Spring  by David Szalay

I decided in December that this year, 2012, would be the year of the novel, and Spring was among the first two or three I read. Sadly, the book hasn’t seemed to get the attention it should have, which makes some measure of sense, given that the book’s among the absolute most quiet narratives I’ve read in I can’t think how long.

The novel’s fairly simple to paint in broad strokes: it’s a novel of a relationship between James and Katherine, and the year’s 2006 and the setting’s London and the only aspect of the previous that really ends up mattering at all while reading the book is that it’s a novel of a relationship. Incidentals, should you be interested: Katherine works at a hotel, James works not at all in the present tense of the novel (thought he was once worth more than a million, and was part of an internet start-up of promise, about which more in a second).

The deal with the relationship at this book’s heart is that it’s not a good relationship. Scratch that: it’s a terrible relationship—James doesn’t love Katherine, nor she James, but the sparks and energy created by the narrative is in how they miss, how they each attempt to, ultimately, use each other to fill these holes in their lives, and how they both fail—in filling the holes for themselves, and in being the person able to fill the holes for the other. If nothing else, Spring would be devastating for how surgically exacting it was in dissecting an imperfect relationship.

However: there’s this whole other level to Spring, which has to do with the aughts and the laziness the easy wealth of that time engendered. James is equal parts tempting and repulsive exactly because he was at one point so recently potentially worth so much—you’re embarrassed for wanting to be near someone who almost was worth millions, yet it’s hard to get fully away from it as well. Szalay maps that toxic area of repulsion and appeal—moral, I mean, not physical—better than anyone I’ve ever read.

Be appraised: this book is a quiet and slow burner. I can’t say I finished it breathless and enraptured, but I can say it’s been nearly two months and I haven’t really shaken its spell. Read up, pronto.

The Odds by Stewart O’Nan

Though I’m a huge O’Nan fan and have loved his last 5 or 6 absolutely without reservation, The Odds is, unfortunately, a huge miss. It’s not that it’s bad—O’Nan’s writing’s never bad—it’s just that it’s frustratingly blah, a novel so easy to check out of you find yourself, page 50, wondering why you’re still reading (which is doubly hard in this novel, given its brevity—you feel like if you get 50 pages in, you may as well finish it, given that’s nearly halfway through the thing).

Art and Marion are headed to Niagara Falls—the scene of their honeymoon—to celebrate the final days of their marriage. They’re about to, for financial reasons, divorce. They’re about to lose their house, and Art’s been fired, and the life they’ve known has, in all ways, broken down (there’s backstory, deeper aches: Art had an affair [heterosexual] that Marion found out about; Marion had [a lesbian] one that Art’s never found out about). They’re here to gamble it all: Art, mathematically inclined, has a system for playing European roulette, the odds of which are just remotely in their favor, and if they can bet big enough at the right time, they can win.

The Odds ends up being decent as character work for both Art and Marion, though best of luck finding a way to care about these two: Art’s nice but feckless, and Marion’s insufferably bitchy, a scene-ruiner every time she’s on the page, someone who in real life would be, if not friendless, just barely put up with by friends.

Ultimately, the book’s got a complicatedly earned ending, and it’s fine and decent enough, but the problem is that you don’t care about Art or Marion—they’re just not worth the amazing firepower of O’Nan’s prose and attention. You’re best off skipping this one and rereading Last Night at the Lobster.

(Maybe Strange) New Waves

by Weston Cutter

I’ve rhapsodized about John D’Agata already, but I’d like to do so now with specificity: his new book, About a Mountain, is in several ways great even if, yes, it may be frustrating for its conflation of certain factual events (Brock’s Sunday NYTimes half-takedown, for instance)(but if you’re gonna read Brock, too, you’ve got to read Gilbert, here, as tonic)(I get Brock’s frustration, but I think he’s off; I think he’s trying to use a logical appeal to an emotional/structural question, and that, at least rhetorically, seems unfair).

What’s most important to know about D’Agata’s book is that regardless of the objective slipperiness you may or may not feel, the burning central question he’s addressing in his book is riveting and worth all of our attention, and that question is: how does info get transmitted, get communicated? (see here–a recent interview) Ostensibly about Yucca Mountain and spent nuclear waste and whatever system will need to be invented to hip future generations to the fact that there’s wildly, hugely dangerous stuff buried within (imagine a life-almost-ending catastrophe and consider our present responsibility to the future to let them know about the nuclear shit we’re unable to clean up; imagine what the sign would have to say, or look like, and/or in what language[s]). Of course this stuff has to do with semantics and symbols, has to do with information encoded and transmitted in certain ways…

…which has everything to do with the darker, harder part of D’Agata’s book, which is threaded throughout (the whole book’s threaded: D’Agata’s not a straight-line-follower; things meander, and satisfyingly/beautifully) his considerations of Yucca, of the government’s decision-making process about Yucca, about Vegas and its birthday, and that darker/harder part has everything to do with the fact that Las Vegas has the highest suicide rate in the country. And of course the photographed and understood feel of Vegas is basically anti-suicidal (especially if we’re thinking Greek, thinking Eros/Thanatos), but so then why? What info is being transmitted or telegraphed to citizens of that city that ups the odds of fatal jumps, of swerved vehicles, of etc.?

There is of course no answer. More important, the answer itself (even if there was one) wouldn’t matter—the glory of D’Agata’s book is how he crafts his question and consideration. It’s a stunning book, and for anyone who isn’t aware, the new generation of nonfiction masters (if we’re looking at Conover and Vollmann and LeBlanc and Wallace and Weschler as the last generation) is here, and D’Agata’s right at the very front of the pack (tied, I’d argue, with Monson, who’s Vanishing Point‘ll be here covered closer to publication date).

And away entirely from those suicides and that spent nuclear fuel, there’s Paul Austin’s Something for the Pain, subtitled Compassion and Burnout in the E.R. It actually may be a book you could imagine or see coming: Austin’s been an E.R. doctor for decades, and he writes with a ton of grace and decency and awareness about his limits—as Dr., as person—and the variables that absolutely/occasionally F his self equation.

What was fascinating, in reading Austin’s book in the same spell I’ve been reading lots of other interesting nonfiction (Monson, Conover, Shields, D’Agata, Z. Smith), is how much Austin’s book can be read as a step one to Shields’s or Monson’s step two: Austin’s book, of course, gathers its strength and steam based personal narrative, based on Austin’s reflections and recollections and stories. It’s literally impossible (or was for me, anyway) to read the book in the shadows of the other nonfiction I’ve been lately imbibing without fundamentally asking questions of self, of how meaning and info’s transmitted, etc.

All of this probably is way harrier than it needs to be: Austin’s book is so damn good it’s hard to not just be sucked along—not just because of compelling stories (which, how could they not be? they’re connected by emergency), but because Austin’s decent, and kind, and he listens and cares. Even just sitting here, picking it up and paging through, I’m caught re-reading stuff I’ve already read and liked. The juke of the joint is this: Austin’s takes and tales from inside the E.R. are incredible, and touching, and if there’s any evidence necessary that MDs should be given courses in understanding illness as narrative and in treating people as whole stories instead of just as the results of batteries and tests, it’s Austin’s Something for the Pain. We’re living in a rich moment for medical writing—Gawande, Groopman, as ever the granddaddy Sacks—and Austin’s a jewel in the bunch, and this book’s necessary and redeeming in more ways than any reader or hospital-goer may have the audacity to even hope for.

And finally there’s Shields, whose Reality Hunger is (it says it right there on the cover) a manifesto. I don’t know what I can say about this book—plenty’s already been said, plus it’s a book which seems almost designed and intended to resist any sort of reviewerly impulse. The book’s idea/message seems somehow both revelatory and obvious: Shields’s text is basically a rocket directed at reviewers or those tempted toward taking umbrage at things like, well, at things like D’Agata conflating certain facts in his book (or, maybe, in the story of this 17 year old German girl and her ‘mixing’ or plaigarism, depending on your footing).

What’s great about Shields’s book is that the argument’s propulsive and strong, and the book’s shattered and organized in textlet-bits, bite-sized, and the numbered sections carry the reader quickly and forcefully (in good ways) while also allowing us (and forcing us, sort of) to make imaginative/intellectual leaps along with Shields. And the bulk of the book’s purpose centers on the distinction between self and text, between what we are and what we write, between authorship and authenticity and ownership (one of the reasons this book feels like an oh, obviously type thing is because, for instance, we’ve read Paul Malizewski’s Fakers within the past year). Of course a book like this is necessary and key in mammoth ways: in Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind, though there’s unfortunately no reprinting of the essay she wrote for the Guardian (Fail Better, here), there’s plenty that lets the reader in on the idea that an author’s self, an author’s ability to be a fully present and empathetic person, haseverything to do with that author’s execution of a novel or piece of nonfiction which can e- or solicit the same empathy from us, and of course Wallace said similar stuff, ditto Gardner and etc. etc. back forever. Shields is involved with something similar, though less morally loaded: just that our notions of ‘ownership’ and ‘authenticity’ are a bit antiquated, both calendrically and culturally, and it’s probably time to let ourselves move on.

The point is: Shields’s book is somehow both a great wake-up shout and simultaneously a yeah, of course shrug. We need new forms; in this age of selfhood being the ultimate trump (a facebook page and people reading yr tweets as a form of existence), we need to let go of some of the harder-drawn and sharper lines we’ve used in our classification systems. Shields’s Reality Hunger is likely gonna be just the first of many molotov cocktails tossed toward the aging edifice of our present forms.

An Interview with John D’Agata

by Weston Cutter

(John D’Agata’s writing is one of the reasons why being alive in the present moment is fun and exciting. If you need a more thorough explanation of why that last sentence is true, you’re likely without two of the best anthologies ever, and/or you’re likely without two of the best pieces of literature in the last decade or so. Should you own his “About a Mountain” and “Halls of Fame“? Of course you should. Should you own “Lost Origins of the Essay” and “Next American Essay“? Obviously. We’ll run a review of his “About a Mountain” soon, but, until then, here’s an interview with the man).

Has writing always been something you’ve been drawn toward, or did you end up writing because snowboarding didn’t work out (or something like that)? And did you ever spend time working toward/in poetry and/or fiction? What ended up being the big draw for nonfiction–and, especially, the experimental sort of nonfiction you’re involved with?

It was Latin and Greek not “working out” that led me eventually into writing.  I’d been studying Classics for a long time as a kid (because my mom is funky and was always a little overly ambitious for me).  And in college I was still studying Classics—pretty much only Classics—until after I returned from a year abroad in Rome where I had been spending every day attempting to do translations.  And I actually like translating, but what I didn’t enjoy was the realization that these languages that I’d been studying privately for years with tutors were part of a world I really didn’t want to be a part of.  What I loved about Latin and Greek as a kid was that none of my friends were studying these languages, so all of the writers that I was exploring at the time—very rudimentarily, of course—felt like imaginary friends, and their texts truly did feel like a secret language.  Living in Rome for a year kind of ruined that immature fantasy for me.  So, immaturely or not, I basically abandoned Classics and started an English major.  And while trying to fulfill some electives, I bumped into creative writing, particularly essays.  It was then that I realized that essays were what I’d been reading and enjoying all along as a kid.  So it was destiny.

What/who are some of your literary and/or stylistic influences? Was there some specific book or author who pushed you into writing, and specifically into nonfiction?

Didion.  Not that I resemble her in any way as a writer, but I recall being astonished by the level of control she wielded over her essays.  And while she’s changed a lot over the past ten to twelve years as an essayist, I’m still in awe of her work.  I would say even more so perhaps, because it’s even more confident these days.

Regarding About a Mountain, did you set out to write the book that you ended up writing? If not, what was the book you were aiming to write? Or was the book initially about just the politics of putting spent nuclear fuel inside a mountain?

I set out to write a funny book, actually.  All I knew about Yucca when I started researching the mountain was that an obscure government panel had been formed about a decade earlier to investigate how to mark Yucca’s site with a warning sign whose message and medium could remain intact and coherent for 10,000 years.  I thought that that was going to be entertaining enough to carry me for a few years.  And my only real objective was to write amusingly about it.  But in the midst of researching Yucca my mom moved to Las Vegas, which is just south of the mountain.  And that suddenly changed everything.  In the book it’s suggested that it was my mom who introduced me to Yucca, but in reality I had been poking around the subject for a few years thanks to a friend who was working as a subcontractor on the project.  With my mom’s arrival in Vegas however, my attitude toward both the place and the project dramatically changed.  Because now this nuclear waste that would be headed for Yucca Mountain was going to be traveling within a dozen or so miles of my mom’s new home, and so of course the book became more political for me.  It became personal, and far less funny.  Of course, it’s still absurd, but it’s tragically so.

In terms of craft and your own writing, what’s the process like for creating/discovering the structures that you end up using?

I tend to need a form to work out of before I can begin really working on a project, but I also try to resist imposing form on subjects.  I tried forcing a pre-conceived idea of a form on this new book, for example, and it backfired.  That’s one of the reasons why it took me nine years to write About a Mountain, because I had to start over from scratch about five years after starting it.  I was trying to jam the book into a form that it simply wasn’t meant to take.  So my process is a lot of trial and error.  For me form isn’t just an affectation; it’s part of the experience of a text.  It needs to work in tandem with an essay’s argument.  Otherwise it’s just a gimmick, a distraction.

The book is fundamentally about communication, and at book’s end you seem to close on settling on an idea of Las Vegas as a place which induces this feeling of despair/void…yet you marched in a parade for the city (and ate its birthday cake), and seem to like it quite a bit. Was Vegas itself what you wanted to write about, the draw and repel of it? Is any of the above accurate–do you actually not like it at all, and is the book not actually about communication?

I like Vegas a lot.  My first book actually featured a few Las Vegas subjects as well.  And I marched in the city’s parade because I found out that I share a birthday with the city, which I honestly found exciting.  So while that “despair” that’s felt at the book’s conclusion is real, so is my love for Vegas.  The Las Vegas that is criticized in the book is a Vegas that, for me, is emblematic of America.  Certainly, most of America doesn’t look or feel or function like Las Vegas, which is why Las Vegas is special.  But, on the other hand, most of Las Vegas doesn’t look or feel or function like Las Vegas, which is a point that the book makes.  Las Vegas is mostly an idea, it’s a conceptual tourist destination.  I mean, it’s a real place that people visit of course, but it’s the idea of the place that people bring with them to Vegas that really makes the city what it is.  Otherwise, Las Vegas is just a town with a big amusement park at its center.  It’s not like the families that live there or the politicians that run the place have a looser sense of morality than the rest of the country.  It’s not there are no laws there.  I grew up in an adorable little seaside town of 5,000 people on Cape Cod and I can tell you without a speck of hesitation that the politics and the people of that place are a hell of a lot nastier than anything I’ve encountered in Vegas.   So I like Vegas.  It’s what we as a nation have decided to allow Vegas to represent in our culture that I find problematic.  Because what it’s representing is inside all of us.  We really do not leave it there when our vacations are over, no matter what the city’s advertisements like to tell us.  We bring that shit with us and it follows us home.

On the issue of “communication”: sure.  I think the book’s about information, personally.  But information is a form of communication, so I think that works.

Just out of curiosity, what was the initial tug for compiling the essay collections? Simply their lack, and that you had the urge to see them realized? And did you know/sense from the start that you’d end up with three massive volumes? And how unbelievably tough is the compiling/editing process involved?

I first started thinking about the anthologies in grad school.  I was in school during the late 90s, right smack in the middle of the burgeoning memoir thing.  So my interest in putting together a history of “this kind” of essaying was, admittedly, reactionary at first.  I want to demonstrate that there was more to the genre than how we seemed to be interpreting the genre at the time—and, to some extent, more to how we are still interpreting it.  So yes, it was in response to a lack.  But not just of anthologies.  There was a lack of conversation happening in the genre about our heritage as writers, or even about of our place in contemporary literature.  I was far more cocky when I started the anthologies than I am now, and I thank the gods for that.  Because I don’t think that I’d have the guts today to demand from readers what I demanded from them in that first anthology.  Although, oddly enough, I think the second anthology—which is the newest one—is the one that’s gotten more people upset.

In editing the anthologies, you said the impulse was somewhat reactionary at first.  How has the guiding principle or impulse changed since then, if at all? Do you think (in general, in publishing) there’s less an emphasis on the monumentally first-person-based stuff of a decade/decade-and-a-half ago?

No, I think the publishing world would still like nonfiction to be history, commentary, or personal writing—easily marketable categories.  It’s still uncomfortable with the more meditative stuff that has primarily comprised work in this genre throughout history.  And that’s probably one of the reasons why the book industry shifted from using “essay” as a term to describe what goes on in this genre, and started embracing “nonfiction.”  So my guiding principle hasn’t changed since I first started the anthologies.  I’m working on the last one now, and I still feel the same need to remember that there’s a lot more to this genre than the achingly boring confessional stuff that’s been overwhelming us since the 90s.

What is experimental nonfiction? Further, does a distinction like that matter that much to begin with?

The distinction doesn’t matter.  You can call this work whatever you want.  Just don’t call it “nonfiction.”

What’s the view out your window?

Hmm.  Something witty, I wish.

Surprise As Muscle Stimulant

by Weston Cutter

            True: seven years ago, one of the first books I ever got to review was John D’Agata’s stunning, mind-changing, genre-shifting/-defining Next American Essay. It’s one of maybe four essential anthologies I can think of; it’s for sure the best non-fiction anthology ever, and I can’t imagine the insanely great book that’d have to come along to unseat it.

            Also true: I’ve read maybe ten graphic novels in my entire life, and I’m beginning to realize that I’ve held back on them because…well, I don’t know. Certainly something of it’s my BS snobbery re: pictures on the page of a book, but that’s not everything. I think, in all honesty, that I haven’t read graphic novels  because, in a way, I haven’t known how.

            And keeping to the truth thing: both John D’Agata and Josh Neufeld are, with their books The Lost Origins of the Essay and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, involved in teaching readers how to read. If that sounds at all patronizing, I’d encourage you to try to remember the books that’ve meant the most to you, and to remember that almost all of them taught you something new not just about the world, or language, but about how to read to begin with.

            D’Agata’s is the easier of the two to parse, at least for me: there may be nobody working better or harder to push at perceived notions of what an essay is. Just as intimidating biographical background: he’s edited two anthologies now; he wrote Halls of Fame and has a book coming about Yucca Mountain (his Iowa bio site [yes, he teaches Creative Nonfiction at the U of Iowa--the Writer's Workshop] says the book’ll be called The Lifespan of a Fact, but Amazon and the Norton catalog say it’ll be called About a Mountain); he’s an editor at Seneca Review.

            All of which is impressive enough, but the trait that makes D’Agata a national treasure is his restlessness; not unlike dear old unstoppable Eliot Weinberger, D’Agata somehow perfectly balances the drive for novelty and strangeness—for experimentation—with an aesthetic appeal that makes his work, both as an author and as an editor (though it’d likely be more fair to call his task in the anthologies more akin to a curator) freakishly readable and fun. For those who haven’t dipped at all into the anthologies (both, for the record, published by the world’s best press), D’Agata writes directly to the reader, as guide, before each essay. From the first such entry in Lost Origins, titled “To The Reader”

            “It’s embarrassing, of course, to think nonfiction destroyed the world, especially since some readers are still suspicious of the form: a genre that is merely a dispensary of data—not a true expression of one’s dreams, ideas, or fears. But I think this misperception is prevalent today because we haven’t yet laid claim to an alternative tradition. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes. So this is a book that will try to offer the reader a clear objective: I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce.”

            Take a second to sit back and gasp at the audacious honesty of that—D’Agata’s willingness to admit the lack of clarity inherent in reading nonfiction; the gutsy staking of a claim that is that last sentence. Take a second, if you want, to consider why you yourself read nonfiction, what you want from the form.

            I don’t know if I’ve already had so much Kool-Aid that the conclusion’s foregone for me, but, honestly, D’Agata’s Lost Origins of the Essay seems as surprising and encouraging a book as I can conceive of. Like the best work (art or music or poetry or whatever), you’re somehow compelled, though the work, to wonder about stuff, and then you’re somehow given not answers but examples or ideas which resonate with the questions and curiosities you’ve been introduced to. That’s a dicey and convoluted way of saying: I’ve never read any Heraclitus before, but I have now, and somehow, pages and pages later, I felt some similar flame running through Yoshida Kenko’s In all things I yearn for the the past, and, even later, felt some shocking, wild and connecting element in Michael Butor’s Egypt (which might be the best essay in the book, if one was gonna get silly enough to try to even use that word).

            Every single essay in this book is worth the price of the book itself, but the chief and cohesive magic, I think, is D’Agata’s. One of those dumb litmus tests that seems occasionally to be run is the question “what’ll be read in 50 years?” If it’s not D’Agata’s anthologies, we’ll be in bigger trouble than we need to be.

            And then there’s Josh Neufeld‘s A.D., which was one of the best reads I’ve had in some time for all sorts of reasons. First and simplest, the thing’s just stunningly good-looking, is well-drawn and -put-together, has been given great treatment by Pantheon, etc.

            And the story—who doesn’t still want to hear about Katrina? Without getting too political, has there been a greater source of domestic shame in the last decade plus? Could there be? I feel like the general awareness of what happened is “there was a big storm,” which, while certainly true, doesn’t come close to what happened there.

            So, of course: thank god for Neufeld, and for Dave Eggers, and for everybody else doing good work to get all aspects of the narrative of that particular and horrific event disseminated. Here’s a dangerous and tricky question: what do you remember about Katrina? Remember people went to the Superdome? Remember that police at a bridge turned survivors away, forcing them to back to New Orleans? Remember the supposed roving bands of gangs and murderers and etc?

            All of these questions and recollections: all of them are infinitely more complex than what’s officially recalled or recorded. Those bands of gangs and armed folks? Neufeld’s presenting them in a different view, a (maybe) new light. Those people who stayed in the city despite the Mayor’s urging for everyone to leave? They weren’t all hopelessly silly and dumb or anything else: they simply made decisions based on info anyone who wasn’t from NO couldn’t totally get.

            Which is the real magic Neufeld’s pulled in his book: he’s giving the storm in a new (to me) context. It’s got lots to do with the fact that this is a graphic novel: the temptation to simply read the words and, therefore, digest the ‘story’ is fine, but flawed: the narrative—words and pictures—unfolds in such a meticulous, inter-woven way that I can’t imagine a straight non-fiction book coming close to packing the same whallop.

            Plus there’s a question of speed. Graphic novels should, I thought, take less time to read than a regular novel would. While that’s to some degree true, I was awed by how Neufeld’s complex, engaging drawings forced me to move more slowly—how I was forced to quite honestly read more than I was used to reading (if you’re used to reading graphic novels, you already know all of this).

            Anyway, there’s plenty more, but the way to cover all that’s left to cover is for you to either go online and read A.D. or for you to go the store and buy it and read it. Those are the options.