Not As Messy As You'd Think: "In Praise of Messy Lives"

Book: In Praise of Messy Lives
Author: Katie Roiphe
Pages: 261
Copy: library copy
Read: mid-December
Spoilers: back to essays!

I requested this book from the library because I read a review that discussed how controversial Katie Roiphe is. I was excited--a woman essayist who starts fights! This is the woman for me! Naturally, her book was a complete disappointment.

Her writing style isn't that interesting. She may attack Joan Didion in a long essay, but her own style isn't so different. She uses some personal details, but never fleshes them out (she complains that Joan Didion's memoir is described as "'deeply and intensely personal,' and yet what is striking is how impersonal the book actually is." Roiphe's essays may be "deeply and intensely personal," but they're still strikingly impersonal). She has little in the way of style--I didn't linger over any of her sentences, the way I did with Joan Didion and even Anne Fadiman. Her writing style is academic and utilitarian. There is little color and no music in her sentences. This is the style of modern academic essays, but I expect more from personal essays--especially essays sold to the wider public.

Perhaps the most aggravating part of this collection of essays is the banality of Roiphe's insights. It is no compliment to myself when I say I could have made the same observations as Roiphe. She doesn't enlighten--she points out the obvious. There are few interesting criticisms and almost no intriguing social commentary. George Orwell could take a very basic and very boring part of culture and make astonishing claims about what those things said about society as a whole. Roiphe can't do that.

What intrigued me the most is the fact that Roiphe seems secretly conservative. She writes all about her unconventional family--she is raising two children on her own--and writes at great length about all the criticism she gets. But I never got the feeling that she actually accepts her situation. To me, it seems that she actually agrees with all the criticism. But there's also the sense that she loves to be a martyr. "Look at poor me, raising two fatherless children! Give me your pity and your criticism, because I deserve it!" In more capable hands, Roiphe's life story could have been striking. (I couldn't help but think that if Cheryl Strayed had written Roiphe's book, it would have been absolutely the most stunning book of the year. In Roiphe's hands, everything falls utterly flat.)

Only one essay from this collection has stayed with me. In "Making the Incest Scene," Roiphe writes about the way that incest has become the go-to "dark secret" of modern literature and how no one does it believably. While I think her criticism is spot on, I'm not sure incest is as pervasive as she imagines. Still, while I've thought about that essay once or twice since I read this collection, her analysis and observations in that essay are as superficial as all the other essays. The essay has no point but to point out incest. It goes no deeper.

I really can't figure out what is so controversial about Roiphe. Once or twice I caught myself frowning as I read her essays, but I never felt the need to rail against her. Her essay on Joan Didion bothered me a little, but I thought she made fair points. How does this woman start fights? Perhaps it is the way she writes about her family--I could see some "family values" readers becoming irate about that. Still, how she's earned a name as a "bad girl" eludes me. Orwell says more outrageous things, and he's been dead for almost 63 years. Roiphe is going to have to try a lot harder if she wants to make a lasting impression on American letters.

I don't hate this book, exactly, I'm just disappointed. Yet again another essayist has failed. Perhaps the essay form is just too out-of-date; it seems like no one knows how to do it right anymore. How can a collection this light and shallow cause any sort of controversy at all? Is it because a woman is expressing her opinions? I can only hope that isn't the only reason. Surely women are allowed to express their opinions without being labelled a "controversial writer." George Will writes his opinion all the time, and he's been called "the most powerful journalist in America."

This might be a good introduction to essays--I mean, Roiphe is readable, and shallowness of interpretation might help a person get use to reading cultural essays. Still, I'm not sure exactly who the target audience here is. Women? I hope not. Women deserve well-written essays too. I suppose I can only recommend this to people who want to stay abreast of pop literary culture. I really don't care what is written, it has to be written well. Roiphe needs to learn more about craftsmanship before she can become truly enduring.

--Benvolia

Battles with the Spree: Nick Hornby's "Housekeeping vs. The Dirt"

Book: Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

Author: Nick Hornby

Pages:153

Copy: Sonoma County Library paperback

Read: first week of October

Spoilers: essays--so what's there to spoil?

This is the first book by Nick Hornby that I've read, and it isn't a bad introduction. While Hornby is perhaps better known for his fiction, he is a truly delightful essayist. He has an engaging voice and he isn't afraid to give his opinion (though The Believer requires all book reviews published in its pages to be positive--forcing Hornby to engage in some amusing acrobatics when he reads something he doesn't like), two important characteristics of an essayist. That his subject is rather narrow (he focuses on his opinions of books and rarely ventures further into social commentary as, say, George Orwell might) is his only limiting factor. However, Hornby is a surprisingly fascinating character, so his essays don't suffer dramatically; nevertheless, I must admit that I've forgotten most of his opinions, and it's been less than two weeks. He's amusing, but fleeting.

Perhaps the best aspect of his essays is his honesty about magazine-writing. He describes the many battles he has with his editors: the differences of opinion, the attempts at control and manipulation, and so on. To what extent he is exaggerating is difficult to ascertain, but even his exaggeration is amusing. (For instance, the number of editors fluctuates sensationally from, for example, 55 to 15 to 430. To this moment I have no idea how many editors he has, though in one quasi-honest passage he says there are 64. But I still don't believe him completely.) He seems like a particularly difficult person to deal with (at the very least, that is the personality he develops throughout the pages of his reviews), but he's always amusing in his crankiness.

Hornby reviews a variety of books, but each review is so short it's hard to decide whether or not you want to read the book yourself (though I'm not entirely sure getting you to read any of these books is the point--I think Hornby uses his essays to explore what is interesting to him by way of what he reads each month, which isn't a bad alternative). To be honest (since this isn't The Believer), Hornby's essays are incredibly scattered, occasionally making them difficult to follow. At times this collection felt like a very small piece of something much larger, with references that didn't make sense to someone jumping in to the middle (this is the second collection of articles from his column--perhaps his first, The Polysyllabic Spree, would clear up some of the things I missed).

At any rate, Hornby is a good writer and he has an excellent voice. His articles might be best for those who read omnivorously and who read a lot. His essays aren't aimed at the average American reader, which isn't to say they're written academically. But there is an obvious strain of elitism and snobbery that runs through them, a strain that might put off some readers. Then again, almost all essayists have those that love them and those that loath them.

--Benvolia

Ms. Reader: Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris”

Title: Ex Libris

Author: Anne Fadiman

Pages: 157

Copy: borrowed from Sonoma County Library

Read: September 4-5, 2012

Spoilers: Again with the essays!

Yesterday, wishing to avoid investing my entire paycheck in books as I occasionally do when the feeling hits, I wandered around my public library and collected a huge stack of books (huge not in quantity but in size).  I’ll admit the diversity of topics represented in this pile makes me giddy: two Joan Didions (two hardcovers, one 1122 and the other 223 pages), a book simply titled Dissent in America (hardcover, 792 pages including index, but it looks as large as a dictionary), Reading Lolita in Tehran (a medium-sized paperback, 343 pages), a book on anarchism between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s (a heavy hardcover of 482 pages), and, of course, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris (a charming shrimp of a paperback that barely covers 157 pages).  Perhaps the pile isn’t so large—I may have only been overwhelmed by the weight and the slipperiness of the dust jackets.

At any rate, I came home and consumed in two short sittings Ex Libris.  (Perhaps its slimness made it the most appealing.)  While Fadiman is no Didion (Fadiman’s essays are somehow softer, lacking the crisp phrasing of a truly accomplished essayist), she is a funny writer who obviously loves her books.  That makes her a saint to me.

Ex Libris contains short essays, each on some aspect of her reading life, whether it is her obsessive habit of proofreading everything or her guilty pleasure (catalogs).  As in any essay collection, some are better than others.

Fadiman opens with the fantastic essay “Marrying Libraries,” a meditation on what it means to combine libraries with the person you love and to whom you are married.  Along the way the essay explores the many ways people organize their books (perhaps by color, or maybe by author, or even by continent, as well as all the ways to organize within a category—once you divide your books by continent, how do you organize them?  Fadiman’s response may be overly complicated [British in chronological order, American by author], but a quite reasonable response if you’re obsessed with organizing your library).  (I reorganize my library at least four times a year, always in different ways.  As my best friend pointed out, books need new neighbors with which to converse.  I’ve always liked the idea of creating strange juxtapositions, just so I can ponder what sort of arguments books will get into as neighbors.  My two, double-packed shelves of mass-market paperbacks are giving me the most fun right now.  Somehow I doubt Carl Sagan’s Contact often ends up sandwiched between This Side of Paradise and Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, but I image its quite happy there.  And I couldn’t guess what sort of circumstances would lead to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars ending up between Dialogues of Plato and Anna Karenin, but Plato needs to loosen up a little and read some science fiction.  How Red Mars is getting along with Tolstoy, though, is beyond my ken.  See how much fun this is?)

I also enjoyed her essay “My Odd Shelf,” a discussion of her literary obsession (failed polar expeditions—successful ones aren’t romantic enough).  Fadiman defines an odd shelf as “a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner” (21).  I hardly know which shelf is my Odd Shelf (I’m tempted to say my whole library is an Odd Shelf, but that seems doubtful).  Perhaps my environmental shelf is the obvious choice, though I’m tempted to say it’s my Penguin shelf, since I have a Penguin shelf right now, but I’m not sure devotion to a publishing house really counts.  (By the way, you know you’ve entered a whole new level of book-love when you can rank your favorite publishing houses.  Currently, my ranking runs thus: Penguin [within that category: their old mass market paperbacks, their beautifully designed hardcover Penguin Classics, their fantastic yearly Great Ideas collection, and finally their black paperback Penguin classics—they’re new stuff doesn’t count], Oxford Classics, Modern Library, and, finally, Vintage.)  At any rate, Fadiman will make you look at your library and try to work out which parts make the library and which parts make the Odd Shelf, a fun activity for a lazy day.

My only complaint with the collection is Fadiman’s occasional conceit and snobbery.  The essay that explores her obsession with proofreading demonstrates the drawbacks of being too honest—while admitting to her snobby garners some sympathy, she lost all my support on the last page of the essay, where she outlines all the places she could have saved various people or groups money with her affliction (as she calls it).  While the first step is always admitting to your quirky snobberies, the second step is letting everyone else live their lives without your judgment.  (Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” contains some salient advice: Excellent writing “has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear.”  Unnecessary apostrophes may be annoying, Ms. Fadiman, but they rarely make meaning unclear.)  The other essay of Fadiman’s that I disliked is “Eternal Ink,” a rather strange piece about her favorite pen and its replacement, her computer.  One thing that has always annoyed me about writers speaking about how they write is the strange emphasis they place on outdated writing techniques, as if writing with a quill automatically makes you a better author.  (Wendell Berry, who uses a pencil, is the only author I’ve come across that actually has a solid, unromantic reason for using older technology, which he explains in his essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.”)

To conclude, I’d recommend this collection of essays to any booklover of any age (the youngest readers will, at any rate, like to chew on the edges, which I think would make Fadiman quite pleased).  This book would make an excellent present if you have no idea what else to get a person who loves to read (especially if you don’t see eye-to-eye with them about their preferred reading material).  To those who are a bit daring, this might be a good book to present to people who don’t read.  I can’t think of a better introduction to book-love than this collection of essays, which, I hope, can convert even the staunchest anti-reader.

--Benvolia

PS I’m sorry, Ms. Fadiman, if you read this and locate egregious grammatical mistakes.  I belong to the Orwellian school of grammar.

Lady Essayist: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

Book: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Author: Joan Didion
Pages: 238
Copy: a friend’s
Read: June 30-July 4

Spoilers: this is non-fiction—can you really spoil non-fiction?

One evening, as my friends were otherwise celebrating, I had this book, open to the essay "On Self-Respect," thrust into my hands.  (The same friend had previously tried to explain Didion's point about putting a paper bag over one's head, but the exercise didn't really make sense until I actually read the essay.)  I was instantly enamored of Didion.  I read "On Self-Respect" twice before I was dragged back into the festivities.  Joan Didion has a fantastic writing style, rivaled only, I think, by George Orwell.  Her writing is crisp and direct, much like Orwell, and she has the most wonderful turns of phrase.  Some of her sentences read more like poetry than like journalistic prose.  (I think Orwell is slightly better because he can handle tangents so dexterously.  Didion doesn't venture into such territory often, and when she does she keeps it to a sentence or two.  Only Orwell could write 5-10 pages on some topic entirely unrelated to the main body of the essay and still make it important.)


I went into this book thinking I hadn't read any Didion before, but I realized when I read "Marrying Absurd" that I'd read at least one of her essays before.  Surprisingly, I can't for the life of me remember where I encountered this essay before, but I do remember reading it.  I will undoubtedly read more Didion, just as soon as I can get to the library.  Didion is one of those authors I can easily see myself reading every word of.  Her mastery of the essay-form is just too amazing to pass up.


While "On Self-Respect" is still my favorite of her essays, "On Keeping a Notebook" is also exceptional, as is her essay on the Central Valley, "Notes from a Native Daughter."  Some of her essays are uneven and many end surprisingly abruptly, but even her unexceptional essays contain beautiful sentences and perfect images.


Despite the fact this collection is uneven, I'd highly recommend reading it in order.  There's something about reading the pieces in near-chronological order that is simply amazing.  Her first essays are interesting and certainly contain the seeds of the genius that is to come—but they just aren't the same.  However, when they are read as early essays, their shortcomings aren't as visible.  While most collections of essays can be flipped through willy-nilly, this book rewards a straight-forward, linear read, at least the first time.


I also think that any aspiring woman writer, especially if she aspires to write essays, should buy this book and read it daily.  (I think any aspiring male writers should do the same, but female essayists are so few and far between that Didion will perhaps have a deeper impact on women.)  "On Self-Respect" should be read by every young person, especially those that are struggling with internal issues—shyness, loneliness, what have you.  Her points are true, even if they feel a little painful on the first reading.  By the second reading, her points will feel less like accusations and more like coded advice.


—Benvolia