I’m not good with books of essays. I have to switch gears too many times, have to move from one world view to another too quickly (especially if, as in this case, the book is the work of many authors rather than just one). There is also the issue that essays are, or at least should be, works of non-fiction, and I have difficulty evaluating non-fiction that isn’t strictly academic. It’s not that I don’t understand it; I just don’t know what to do with it, where to put it. Non-fiction makes the claim of being more or less factual, but outside of the realm of the academy, where the work is mostly straightforward and boring, non-fiction pushes the same buttons as fiction, and some of the wires get crossed in my head. My brain says to me, I want to process this as factual, but it’s sending me a bunch of the same signals as the stuff that’s supposed to be made-up. Make of that what you will.
This collection is all pieces from a series run by The Washington Post Book World. They are mostly short, each piece being introduced by editor Maria Arana, who also wrote an introduction for the entire volume. Some of the best writing in here, somewhat surprisingly, is hers. What I found was a fairly clear division in emphasis between certain kinds of writers. The journalists, no matter what section of the book their places were in (there are sections on motivation, source material, looking back on your own work, etc.), tended to focus on doing the research, connecting with their subjects, and getting the facts straight. They were completely unconcerned with style, and with one or two exceptions it was virtually impossible to distinguish them; if you were to jumble their bylines and remove the biographical data I doubt that anyone would have noticed the difference. The biographers were all very similar to the journalists in their emphasis, but they had widely varying voices and styles. I gave as much attention to the essays by non-fiction authors as I did to poets and novelists, but to be honest I didn’t really care. Most of them wrote about Great Americans or Great Moments in American History, and if you’ll pardon my language, I just don’t give a shit. Throw a rock into a roomful of a hundred American writers of non-fiction and you’ll hit sixty that write on those themes, thirty five who write about themselves (again, who cares?), and five who actually write about something of interest to the rest of the world. I much prefer writers who make stuff up.
The real reason I picked up this book, and the reason that it took me less than a week to read, instead of the standard two or three weeks with most works of non-fiction, is because of the likes of Carol Shields, Michael Chabon, Julian Barnes, and Umberto Eco. These writers are far more concerned with style than any sort of veracity. Some of them (Shields in particular, dating her piece August 13th, 2000, my twenty-first birthday) were incredibly candid about their relationship to their work once it was out there in the world, and it was refreshing to note that not all writers are Richard Ford or Norman Mailer, supremely, arrogantly confident. (I had a chuckle when Carol Shields was claimed as an American author; she was born and raised there, but wrote in and about Canada, and she loved this place as much as we, I hope, loved her. She is ours.) Some of the novelists put a distance between themselves and the work, acknowledging biographical influences but treating the work almost like a game (I’m looking at you, Eco), and others treated the work like a calling, rhapsodizing and building a wall of metaphor to isolate themselves from the nuts and bolts of the work. I can sympathize with both views; like Michael Chabon I am paranoid that readers (what few there are; hopefully there will be more in the future, when some of my projects find a home) will recognize the wrong things in my work as autobiographical, and I will be either vilified or mocked as being self-righteous, and like others I do feel the work is a kind of calling, a thing that must be done rather than a thing that I simply want to do. But really kids, you still have to sit down and do the damned work (playwright Wendy Wasserstein and some of the “pop” writers wrote excellent pieces that negotiated those two issues in interesting and useful ways).
It’s not always as good as it could be (Jimmy Carter? Please.), but this collection was one of the best of its kind that I have read, and it will stay in an easy to reach place on my bookshelf for a while to come.
Next, to acknowledge the great man’s passing, I will be re-reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and possibly a few others.
