I was surprised and heartened to see that John D'Agata is making two appearances today as function of Creative Nonfiction Week: 3:30 at Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, eighth floor (panel discussion), and 6:30 PM, Ferguson Auditorium, 600 S. Michigan (reading). If you're truly look for creative nonfiction, he's a big choice. A large alternative for better or worse;
let me explain:
His compendium of original essays, Halls of Fame, is a difficult book, sometimes frustrating, sometimes rewarding. One of the things I value most about D'Agata, even when I wonder why he's doing a sure thing, is that he's preoccupied with the shape of the test and really trying to promote the boundaries of the genre. And the test is an interesting thing, right now, to be an adept in. One one hand, you could indicate that the genre is dying; on the other, you could indicate that, with the surface of electronic media, more people are reading essays (broadly defined, but that's ever been the case) than ever. And D'Agata is on the forefront of how the genre is outlined and conceived.
For instance: "Notes towards the devising of a whole man being:" is a five-page essay about one of my alma maters, Deep Springs College, consisting of one run-on (but well-composed) sentence (technically one time with a five-page parenthetical). The vanity is that Deep Springs is a weird place (true) attended by odd, ambitious, sometimes pretentious people (true) who speak and write at length as division of the performative act of being a pupil there (true), "as if there were a concern in the desert like the concern at both ends of Us since it started that if we were to pause to breathe, take a photo, send a postcard, set up camp for a piece in the eye of this great American periodic sentence westward, then we would lose our position on the trail...."
And D'Agata - who was a pupil there - captures a lot near the school. You could induce the same spot without the conceit, and as often as I wish to compose long sentences I wouldn't have used that approach, but it even works.
It is probably worth noting here that one of Deep Springs's most notable alumni is William Vollmann, whose encyclopedic, showy, obsessive style and peripatetic subject matter reminds me of D'Agata. In other words: I think D'Agata really does get something around the school.
Another example: The title essay, "Halls of Fame: An Essay About the Ways In Which We Matter," has several pages of barbed wire brand names as percentage of the subsection "National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum of Freedom." Again, it's showy, encyclopedic, and a conceit - but that doesn't think it doesn't work. Perhaps even better than actually writing about the significance of barbed wire in the subsidence of the West.
If Halls of Fame sounds a little too bonkers for you, he's also edited The Following American Essay (which I've read) and The Lost Origins of the Essay (which I haven't but it's on the list). The other has a full range, from stuff you've probably read (Joan Didion, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace) to people who you probably haven't, or at least I hadn't (Thalia Field, Mary Ruefle).
He has a new book due out next year, about Yucca Mountain, where I've been. One of the grains of salt you should make this with is that I share some of the like experiences and interests as D'Agata, so I'm going to be more disposed to see his work fascinating.
You might just think he's not a skillful writer. I think Sarah Vowell's take is reasonable:
"Like I said, there should be books like this-like D'Agata's Halls of Fame. I'm not certain how many of them I can bear to read. But it must be a will to D'Agata's ingenuity that I've never felt quite so protective of a word that gets on my nerves."
I think what I'm saying is: if you're interested in nonfiction, and particularly essays, he knows a lot, and will likely say interesting things today.
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