Bookloft Staff Picks

I’ve been pondering the difference in my experience of reading fiction & nonfiction… & it’s gotten to be (the pondering) a bit more than ponderous sometimes.  Over the past few months (& years), my most enjoyable reading, & the predominant part of it, has been in nonfiction, & the fiction I’ve read (with exceptions noted below) has been mostly disappointing, for larger & smaller reasons & suppositions.  When David Shields’ book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf) came out last month & I picked it up due to the accompanying book buzz (buzz-buzz), a lot of what he was proposing struck a chord with what I’d been feeling lately while reading.   [The nut, essentially: "What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of "facts," "truth," "reality"), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological questions. The lyric essay is the literary form that gives the writer the best opportunity for rigorous investigation, because its theater is the world (the mind contemplating the world) and offers no consoling dream-world, no exit door."]  Some of us at The Bookloft have been casting this reading disappointment, or dilemma, or disagreement (or some other duh-word), as the contrast between fiction (the novel mostly) & nonfiction (biography, memoir, essays, history, dare-I-say poetry) & in my mind’s eye I’ve dramatized it as a sort of epic contest, like a Clash of the Titans, but of course it’s not like that at all.  (Though I’ve no doubt that Monty Python could totally embody & absurdize this duality wonderfully.)  No, like most conflicts, this is most interesting as an internal one… Let me see if I can characterize it sufficiently for you.

[I'm seeing now that this'll be a multi-part blog-post, so in an effort to reduce the bloggage to just two carry-ons (so to speak), I'm going to halve the discussion & book-blurbing into its nonfiction & fiction components & post the nonf-one first.]

When I was a child, I read as a child (when I wasn’t glommed onto the teevee), that is to say I wanted to read of thrilling adventures that at the same time had a familiar reality to me.  (The Hardy Boys, anyone?)  There were the occasional Rutabaga Stories (Carl Sandburg), but mostly it was (& I was) Lost on a Mountain in Maine (Donn Fendler), reading to do a dutiful book report for school.  As I got older & dumber, I sought out books (mostly fiction, as I was told ‘that’s where it’s at’) that provided a ripping yarn & also a cursory education about a profession or group of people. (Arthur Hailey, James Michener, anyone?)  Then I got totally warped at college: James Joyce laid a whammy on me, not to mention the trance-inducing firm of Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville & Thoreau, followed by Beckett, Pynchon & the other unusual suspects. Talk about getting turned around!?…  What I think has proven the decisive factor in my fiction/nonfiction whirl has been the habit I picked up early in college of getting & reading the Sunday New York Times—there‘s the bias for my reality-based reading—followed by a stream of periodicals at the headwaters of which is The New Yorker, then music magazines, then Bookforum & the NYRoB, then McSweeney’s & latterday The Believer,  then what-have-I…  Less & less time to read a novel, it seems.

All of this as preface (I warned you it was ponderous) to a 20-volume discussion of the merits of fiction versus nonfiction, ending with a final bloviation (aka philosophical meditation) on the worth of it all.  You should recognize & know that I’m of at least two minds about this supposed fiction/nonfiction opposition & that for the purposes of this argument/book-recommending-blog I’m going to cast it as a “What do I feel is worth my time to read?” discussion.  [Because I still love a well-written made-up story or novel---a great one gives me the fresh-air-flowers-blooming-in-the-spring-life-affirming endorphin rush---& I constantly turn encountered facts into potential fiction---putting words to them does it---I'm "really" essentially a fictioneer in nonfictional clothing. Or is that a nonfictionista in fictional clothing?]

In my previous posting I praised Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown) as perhaps the best book I’ve read in quite some time, mostly because she wrote an involving personal/social history with a novelist’s flair.  One felt the writer’s passion for her material & I (two) responded in a dialogue with the world she was presenting; the give-&-take was lively & expansive.  This is what I’m looking for when I open a book, & I’m sure most active readers would agree that making a world come alive in a well-written narrative is what they expect the best writers to do. It can be in a ‘nonfiction novel’ like Capote’s In Cold Blood or in a fictional ‘memoir’ like Nabokov’s Lolita.  There are greater & lesser gradations of commitment to style & substance, but words with life in them is what we want & need to respond to.  Skloot really brings her story home.

So what’s the problem?  Shields is put off by most fiction’s artifice in plot-construction & the falsifying if not outright deadening effect it has in portraying the wider world, especially in the pretense of a third-person narrator.  ’She-said-He-said-They-did’ is such pre-19th century dramaturgidity & Shields wants a more recombinant (mash-up) approach to writing that is “equal to the complexity of experience, memory, and thought” & that exists on the borders of fiction & reality, sometimes straddling them.  He says the lyric essay is (one of the places) where it’s at & I agree with him there.  One of my most fondly remembered books by a favorite short-story & novel writer is Julio Cortazar’s collection of vignettes with illustrations, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (sadly now out-of-print): essays, stories, poems, surrealism. It’s a remarkable instance of a fictionista really coming to life in a multi-genre (mash-up?) journal-like-book, imagining fleeting worlds into existence with his blue guitar.

I’m going to demanifestofy this blog post now & (as my wife would insist) cut to the chase:  the books that most concern (consume?) me now & why.  Along with Shields’ Reality Hunger, there’s a raft of zeitgeisty books about new-media art & culture & its effect on people, some of which I’ve picked up.  Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf) is a cyberspace visionary’s argument for a humanistic technology in the face of the individual’s grappling with society’s ‘hive mind’ groupthink.   Michiko (Kakutani) had some very favorable things to say about Lanier’s manifesto, as opposed to her take on Shields’ “deeply nihilistic” one ; access it by clicking on the second highlighted buzz-link in my first paragraph.  Also I rescued from The Bookloft’s return pile a fascinating, somewhat-similar brief for a humanistic-realistic arts project, David Edwards’ interdisciplinary Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Harvard), which has some nicely autobiographical scenes among the tech cultural history & seems movingly inspirational to boot.  [I've saved it for you; you can buy it or any of the worthies mentioned here now in person or online at The Bookloft.]

Reboot: now for a look at some truly jazzing-to-me new nonfiction titles just teetering on the edge of my reading table.  I’m virtually chomping at them, sniffing them before eating them whole.  Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (Broadway Books) by David Lipsky takes us along on the book tour that Wallace made for his much-vaunted novel Infinite Jest. It takes the form of a transcription from Lipsky’s tape recorder & explodes the genre of author interview into a wonderfully faithful & compassionate (dispassionate?) portrait of the late, lamented light of American fiction.  (Although I must say that I more readily responded to DFW’s nonfiction collections,  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again & Consider the Lobster, he is truly a monster writer of whatever stripe, & I’ve been told that his Big Book is well worth the time it takes to read.)  Top o’ the heap.  Another roundtable of writers talking about their work, The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook (Holt), edited by Daniel Alarcon, under the auspices of the McSweeneyites’ 826 National writing centers, collects the email responses of a number of fine contemporary writers—Jonathan Lethem, Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon, Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Shelley Jackson among them—to the most common questions of craft posed to writers.  Some surprising & lively exchanges make for a kind of mega-Paris Review interview: an inspiring look behind-the-scenes at the typical fictioneer’s struggle.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a neat little gift book (graduation, anyone?) that came my way, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (University of Iowa Press) by Robert D. Richardson, also the author of the sturdy intellectual biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire.

Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day (Free Press) by Robert Rowland Smith looks very tasty, with bite-sized (I might say) episodes of working with Nietzsche, working out with Foucault, reading with Barthes & winding up in bed with Simone de Beauvoir.  It’s friendly (very witty) & fits in the hands nicely too, as portable as a Kindle.  Anne Carson’s NOX (New Directions) is an epitaph for her late brother, in the very interesting form of an accordion of illustrated pages—photos, letters, word origins, regrets—folded into a box.  It is at once poetry, biography & art book: beautiful & strange.  John McPhee’s Silk Parachute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a more wonderful than usual collection of this paragon New Yorker writer’s essays, as it has briefer autobiographical sketches folded into its mix of pieces on geology, lacrosse, fact-checking at The New Yorker, & it just brims with life.  It sometimes reminds me of another favorite New Yorker writer’s memoir, Roger Angell’s Let Me Finish. [By the way, the current issue (#192) of the Paris Review has a really candid & enjoyable interview with McPhee on the art of nonfiction, as well as an interview with s-fictioneer & teen-fave Ray Bradbury & six poems by the incomparable Charles Simic.  All of which can be sampled by clicking on www.theparisreview.org ...]

Wendell Berry is another multifaceted writer I admire for his essays (though his fiction & poetry are equally distinguished), & he has a new collection, Imagination in Place (Counterpoint), with essay/remembrances of Wallace Stegner & Gary Snyder, among others, & ending with a group of essays “Against the Nihil of the Age.”  Very grounded & straight-seeing stuff.  A book that perhaps gets at the nub of the problem this posting started considering, the fiction/nonfiction divide (though I see now it’s better viewed as a continuum than a duality) & Shields’ & Wallace’s etc. etc. disillusion or just plain boredom with fiction’s claim on “reality” (Nabokov says it should always rightly be in quotation marks), such a book is Richard Todd’s The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity (Riverhead), which essays & cuts through the big topics of history & identity & contemporary culture, politics & spin, drugs & mind, ethics & nihilism, considering the choices that make us most authentically human.  Then there is the real wild card in this bunch, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Elif Batuman.  The Roz Chast cover portraits of the eccentric, possessed scholars & grad students sets us up for “one of the funniest books ever written about Russian literature or grad school,” neither of which seem to me to be even slightly humorous, & yet they are!  Several of us at The Bookloft are contending with who will be the first to read & Staff Pick this worthy, brainy, funny essay-memoir, & I have the feeling that it won’t be me (witness the pile o’ books strewn about me here) & so what?  [Parenthetically, yesterday several of us Booklofters were attempting to answer the question, which of us was that day the most neurotic, & we really couldn't decide, we were all three such strong contenders, but I have to say I won.  It was a very Roz-Chasty moment.]

I see the home stretch coming & I haven’t even mentioned the new music books that’ve caught my eye.  What first drew my eye was the cover of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Norton) by Richard Williams, depicting the upturned bell of a trumpet with a blue atomic explosion coming out of it—very cool.  The book itself plays very well with the cultural history of 50′s jazz, Miles in particular, & the modal break that helped usher in everything from free jazz to New Age music.  Eno & ECM are there too, along with Bill Evans & Sun Ra (talk about a pianistic time/space continuum), so this should prove to be entertaining & expansive cultural history.  I hope to improvise upon it as a jazz-book phenomenon on some future blog-date.   Dutch writer/philosopher Sytze Steenstra has newly published his “scrupulously researched & uncannily on-the-money” Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne (Continuum).  Byrne’s assessment above lends this career overview a lot of credibility & the author really delivers some keen insights into this fascinating artist’s work. [By the way, Byrne's blog/website at davidbyrne.com is always of interest & details his travels & fascinations & projects in real detail.  A lot of his newish book Bicycle Diaries (Viking) is drawn from his online journal; it's about much more than getting around by bike in cities & has a breathless, wide-eyed tone that makes me hear his voice as I read it, & it has a deadpan-hilarious author photo to boot!  He's always struck me as being admirably, artistically adventurous & authentically off-the-wall...]   I’m eagerly anticipating (with reservations) the new David Byrne / Fatboy Slim musical theatre project (without the theatre) on Imelda Marcos, titled Here Lies Love (Nonesuch).  With a 120-page book & 2 CD’s & a DVD, it promises to be an extravaganza like Byrne used to do with Robert Wilson, but with a disco beat.  Put on your dancing shoes—sorry.  [Reality Note: April 17th is Record Store Day & I hope to put on my walking shoes & support my local, independent record store (quaint retro misnomer) by picking up the Byrne/Slim piece, as well as other notable Nonesuch releases & serendipitous discoveries, at Tune Street in Great Barrington (www.tunestreetgb.com), a fine establishment & a real audio-visual experience.]

Greil Marcus is an always-interesting music critic & cultural writer; he has a spanking-new book, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (Public Affairs).  This brief book is at once a Van-the-man career-overview & a close-listening to his signature songs. Marcus’s approach is especially illuminating of this somewhat-hermetic-or-inscrutable musician’s world & work; he tells me things I didn’t know about a mid-period Morrison (1979) favorite, Into the Music, “And the Healing Has Begun,” & the liberating interplay he had with his virtuoso string-player Toni Marcus.  Dense & delightful, Greil Marcus always is.  Then I finally pulled out of my stack of publisher catalogs the Continuum Spring 2010 book-list, to see that Peter Mills’ Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison is newly-published as a paperback original (god bless the pbo’s) & looks in-depth & fascinating.  Continuum’s music books are continuually (consistently?) top-drawer & its 33 1/3 series of ‘short books about critically acclaimed & much-loved albums of the past 40 years’—77 strong—is a music-mad reader’s dream.  I still flash occasionally on an old Staff Pick of mine, John Niven’s novelisation of The Band’s Music from Big Pink (33 1/3), as a faithful real-life novel & the way things could have happened.  Witness that among & between last year’s Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal & this year’s forthcoming Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle by Richard Henderson, there’s still a lot of written rumination/cultural history/imagination to plump into discreet little record books.  (Have you ever thought “I could write a book” about a favorite record, like…oh, I don’t know…The Mothers of Invention’s Uncle Meat?  Me neither.)

I must stop now & regroup (as in learning how to break up these blox of text into more shall-we-say lyrical, paragraphical essays), so that I may drop the other shoe of this one-two nonfiction-vs-fiction shuffle, which I guess I’ll call Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Clash of the Titans? Part Duh.  There I will put my spin on the so-called ‘failure of fiction,’ the triumph of marketing, & my past, current & expected future experiences of the novel & my ‘expense of spirit’ & time ‘in a waste of shame,’ to quote the Bard.  It goes without saying, it’s not as great as it seems, says your somewhat worn-out Enthusiast @ The Bookloft.

[Now I put on my real shoes & hustle on down to my local independent store to show support by buying the music & books that so consume me. You may pick up any worthies mentioned here now at The Bookloft during store hours or virtually whenever online at The Bookloft.]  E@TB