Tag Archives: the Essay

All the Rage

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Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence
Geoff Dyer
Picador, 2009

Dyer and his brand of blurrily personal nonfiction is much in the ether lately, or at least the certain subsection of slightly literary inclined internet ether I breath, for better and worse. But more than the chatter overhead, Dyer has been urged on me by a well-read, much-respected friend, and I have finally buckled against my own inability to take reading suggestions and have read Out of Sheer Rage, his book charting his failure to write a sober, academic study of Lawrence.

I thought the book was almost an undiluted joy. Like much of Nicholson Baker’s writing, the book sounds unendurable when subjected to brief description: it’s a book which chronicles the author’s inability to sit still and write about D.H. Lawrence, a writer he both admires and who has penetrated his life to a cellular level. But also like Baker’s U & I, the book manages both to avoid its way into its subject, to be both about the author’s own interests, obsessions, tics, neuroses, while also being about Lawrence, and teaching me–a Lawrence neophyte–a great deal and making me want to read Lawrence desperately.

It also makes me want to read more Dyer. I’m not sure if Dyer’s brand of nonfiction–novelistically pliable and complex and yet learned without being fusty, essayistic without mooning into abstraction, curling into scholarship, or shedding its style into reportage–is indeed the Next Wave, but he is one of those author’s who, as I think Martin Amis said somewhere, you discover with muffled enthusiasm, realizing as you read that you’re now going to have go read everything the man has written.

But I do have a quibble. And for better and worse, quibbles are easier to write about than straight praise: I wished the book had a bit more novelistic furniture, especially toward the end. When discussing Milan Kundera in the middle of the book (pgs. 118-122 in my paperback, where he mounts his quiet assault on the novel), Dyer says, “After reading Immortality what I wanted from Kundera was a novel composed entirely of essays, stripped of the last rind of novelization.” And while I find this idea fascinating and while what I liked about this book of Dyer’s was its associative leaping from idea to idea, I found myself still wanting a little more rind. There are personal, scenic-like details that crop up repeatedly–Dyer’s girlfriend Laura is a wonderful foil, for instance–but these ingredients raise certain expectations that go unfulfilled. For example, Dyer buys a flat in Oxford, England–Dullford, he calls it. And it occurs at a point in the book where this seems like the most reckless action he could take, and yet he doesn’t really go into the why or the how of the purchase. He doesn’t pay it the same kind of narrative attention I was expecting. He thinks about so much in this book, but he doesn’t really allow himself the room to think about this. And it seems less like an interesting narrative maneuver than it does an avoidance of his responsibility as a narrator. In a novel, we would just call this an example of an unreliable narrator, but in a work of nonfiction, does this not just become an author’s mistake?

And while it’s his book, his life, his aesthetic, and while I realize he wants to rid himself of these kind of well-made novelistic restrictions, and while I’m not sure if this fault is either his or mine, I still wanted to hear more about that stupid flat; I wanted to see him besotted by all that paperwork, signing his life away. This is a problem with personal nonfiction of this sort, in that it’s personal only up to a point. It is open but shields the true, fully honest self off from the reader. So, paradoxically, a novel feasibly becomes a more honest way to communicate with a reader because an author isn’t always deploying these invisible firewalls between himself and the reader while maintaining a facade of jocular openness.

Does this reaction make me hopelessly old-fashioned? I feel suddenly like an old man at a concert, complaining about the volume.

Notes on Notes on Sontag

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Notes on Sontag
by Phillip Lopate
Princeton University Press, 2009

In many ways this is the perfect book about Susan Sontag, because Phillip Lopate is so much her opposite—warm where she is cold, personal where she is stiff-armed, steely maned where he is bald, self-doubting where she is authoritarian in her judgment, discursive where she is aphoristic. And yet, despite these differences in approach and sensibility, there is a genuine sympathetic vein running throughout this commentary. Lopate didn’t just read Sontag regularly; his professional life kept intertwining with hers. He was an undergraduate at Columbia when she was teaching there, young and married with a teenaged son. And they knew each other in the professional way of postwar intellectual Jewish writers in New York City. (Ah, it makes one want to move to New York!) They were both interested in many of the same foreign, obscure, aggressively arty films and novels, and they both ended up writing fiction and essays, but are mostly known for the latter. In Sontag’s case, she is of course famous for the aphoristically brilliant, perceptive, withering critical gaze at various artists and intellectuals, not so much “personal essays” as essays as personality. Judgment as a style. Lopate is of course the old king of the personal essay, a bard of wandering through the porousness of his own life tying knots of comprehension, then loosening them.

In fact, one of the most interesting parts of this book, for me, is when he discusses her fiction. He says, “Her fiction is, for the most part, unsuccessful. . . . She lacked broad sympathy and a sense of humor, which are usually prerequisites for good fiction. More germane, perhaps, she did not convincingly command a fictive space on the page.” She often thought of her essays as a distraction from fiction writing, which Lopate finds absurd: “I, who revere the art of essay writing, and who can never regard literary nonfiction as even a fraction inferior to fiction, find puzzling Sontag’s need to be thought primarily a novelist.” It is a strange provincialism of the mind, still prevalent today, that nonfiction is below the novel, that greedy fat king of prose, who, like a threatened toddler, takes all the attention and yet still demands more. He says that Sontag was always overvaluing her fiction while kicking the legs from under her magisterial essays, while he himself thinks that the ratio of critical acclaim portioned out to his essays (high) versus his fiction (not nearly as high) is perfectly fitting. (Why that is, why he’s so agreeable on this, is never explored, and is something I would love to know. Just how did he get this levelheaded about the great novelistic beast?)

But aside from this shop talk, there is just the sympathetic explication of her work. Sontag seems more complex and difficult here and yet warmer somehow in her chilly remove. The judgments on her work are complexly layered and precise, and it makes one want ot read more Sontag, while importing Lopate’s heightened example of sympathy.

The looseness of the book is also a pleasure. The book, a tidy, narrow volume issued by Princeton University Press, rambles, juts forward, and then recycles itself. It’s not redundant, but it’s also not a belligerently progressive, teleological argument. It’s a rumination, a chewing through of Sontag’s oeuvre. If it dwindles somewhat in energy toward the end, it’s only appropriate. Sontag’s career does the same, as does Lopate’s enthusiasm for it.

And finally, it’s one of the best things I’ve read by Lopate. Like Sontag, but yet so unlike her, the peculiar glimmer of his aesthetic sensibility is illuminated by his studious concentration on another writer’s work.

David Foster Wallace Symposium Makes Waves

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Hello. I am happy to announce that the latest issue of the Quarterly Conversation has been published and it contains a gigantic symposium/where-are-we-now collection of essays on David Foster Wallace. And I’m happy to be included.

My essay is about Consider the Lobster, Wallace’s second collection of essays. I talk about how Wallace’s nonfiction is, in general, just plain great, but also how his nonfiction fits within the current ecology of literary writing that is not fiction or poetry, i.e., creative nonfiction, literary journalism, literary fiction, the Essay, New Journalism, Lyric Essay, or whatever handy or not-so-handy moniker you prefer. I also talk a bit about everyone’s favorite manifesto from last year, David Shields’s Reality Hunger.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this in the essay but it feels worth being redundant: we seriously need two types of Wallace books to be published. And by Wallace books I mean posthumous collections of his work. First, we need a book of his uncollected nonfiction. There are a couple of late, great pieces: the Federer piece, the graduation speech. (Yes, I realize they published that last one, but I’m talking about publishing it in a version for actual grown-ups, rather than the annoying, cloying, exploitive, one-sentence-per-page edition that’s out now.) But there are also lots of early book reviews that are languishing in forgotten back issues of various journals. I had a phase during graduate school when I would obsessively locate these essays either within the bound back issues or through Interlibrary Loan (ILL!), typically during the times when I should have been collecting scholarship for my academic papers. There is one out there about fiction and the “conspicuously young” that’s a wonderful explication of the difficulties of graduate creative writing programs and how they affect teachers, students, and the publishing industry in general. It actually adds nutritional meat to the whole MFA Good/Bad debate. Anyway, before I go hunting through my files to start quoting from the thing, my main point is: there’s a good-sized book there and an audience who would appreciate it and buy it.

Second, we need a Portable Wallace, a la the Portable Faulkner. I realize that Wallace’s reputation is not foundering; he needs no Malcolm Cowley to call attention to his greatness or to marshall the forces of culture to keep him in print. I say this instead as someone who has taught college. The problem is Wallace is hard to teach–not in terms of explication/analysis (though, I mean, that too), but in terms of just having a usable edition of his work. Because his greatest piece of fiction is Infinite Jest, and because the most conveniently teachable pieces of his short fiction and nonfiction are scattered between various editions, it would be awfully nice to have a 500-paged paperback with a handful of essays and a good chunk of his fiction. That way you could show what Wallace was up to in various genres without having to dedicate an entire semester to it simply because of the books that one would have to buy.

Before I get too full of myself and start rattling off all the other books I think we need published (a collection of Cynthia Ozick’s essays on Henry James? an updated edition of Peter Taylor’s Collected Stories?), let me also mention all the other great DFW-related essays in the issue: my main man Scott Esposito on Infinite Jest; Edie Meidav on A Supposedly Fun Thing; CJ Evans on Brief Interviews; Lance Olsen on Oblivion; John Lingan on The Pale King; and Andrew Altschul on “The Suffering Channel,” among other things. I’m happy to be a part of this symposium, especially since after the initial publicity wave for The Pale King crested and dissolved, Wallace-related criticism seemed to dry up. Also, finally finally, there is still the regular round of reviews and interviews in the issue.