Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw myself into it with ardor, this sensuous life, and when I was not dreaming that I was going to grow up to marry the pretender to the throne of France and win back his crown with him, I was dreaming of being a Carmelite nun, cloistered and penitential; I was also much attracted by an order of fallen women called the Magdalens.

When Mary McCarthy was a little girl, she took a train from Seattle to Minneapolis, where her parents meant to relocate near to her aunt and uncle. On that train, the entire family caught the Spanish flu, and by the time that McCarthy herself emerged from her convalescence, both of her parents were dead, having died within a day of each other. Thus began an unusual childhood, first under the care of her cruel resentful aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, then under her stern but caring Protestant uncle in Seattle. During that time, McCarthy latched onto the Catholicism of one side of her family, perhaps as a way of providing a consistency and continuity in a life of upheaval, or perhaps just because the grand drama of the Catholic religion can be appealing to a young girl. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a series of essays that chronicles these years of Mary's life.

One interesting thing that McCarthy does here is append an italicized afterword to each essay, presumably having been published somewhere else and at some other time, detailing how, where, and why, she'd taken poetic license. There's a great story of a rule-obsessed teacher at the Catholic boarding school who bonds with McCarthy over a love of Cicero's ancient fight with Cataline, but who nevertheless reports McCarthy--at the risk of expulsion--for sneaking out of the dormitory during the last week of school. I liked this one because it's an interesting profile of a recognizable kind of person, who clings to the rules for their own sake, despite the laxity that characterizes the actual figures of authority. But in the afterword, McCarthy describes how the timeline has been compressed to make the teacher's betrayal seem even more quixotic than it really was, how it probably wasn't just the day after they'd concluded their play, to great applause and aplomb from the student body.

As a book of essays, there isn't a strong throughline like a more traditional memoir, but this didn't bother me; McCarthy is such a strong, sensitive, and funny writer. In fact, I enjoyed this book a great deal more than her novel The Birds of America, having the funny-but-true verisimilitude of a real life, though perhaps not as much as the (in some ways, drawn equally from life) novel The Group. As the title suggests, the essays are drawn together perhaps by the strength of McCarthy's not-quite-cradle Catholicism. McCarthy captures well how a childhood religion can mix aesthetic and cultural concerns with deeper, more spiritual ones, how these can often be indistinguishable. As a teenager, McCarthy "loses her religion" as a kind of social ploy to receive sympathy and attention from her boarding school classmates, as well as the school's nuns and priests, but then a funny thing happens: she's not able to find it again. As ever happens, the pretenses we take end up becoming real.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. For one brief moment we noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, a memoir of her experience training a falcon in the wake of her father's death, might be my favorite non-fiction book of the past several years. I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and part of its appeal was its literariness: Macdonald interweaves her own story with rich threads of fiction, like that of fellow falconer T. H. White, and history and myth. But it also resonated with me because, like several people have in the wake of the COVID-10 pandemic, I have become more interested in birding and birds. Though training a hawk and birdwatching are very different pursuits, they share an inexplicable sense of satisfaction that derives from the way human and animal life intersects.

One of my favorite essays from Macdonald's new collection Vesper Flights hits much closer to home: Macdonald describes watching fall migrants in New York City from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, whose bright lights both attract and confuse the birds. In her account they "resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire" and "ghostly points of light." In this moment Macdonald captures a very specific sense of amazement that occurs when one realizes that New York City, the concrete jungle, is--and has always been--a place where birds have lived lives that precede and overwrite us. Birding in New York puts me in touch with the transitory nature of life, as if the earth wears the city lightly.

The experience of reading Vesper Flights can't compare to H is for Hawk. The strength of that memoir is not just in the incision of its insight but the power of its narrative: the tortuous twin processes of training the hawk and coming to terms with the death of a father. The essays in Vesper Flights can feel too brief and too numerous, and when there are so many the form begins to show. The epiphanies come, as they never do in life, with a little too much regularity. The strongest essays are often the ones that linger the longest, like a long profile of a researcher who uses Chile's Atacama Desert as a stand-in for the surface of Mars, or an account of the yearly ritual of "swan upping," in which the Queen's swans--she owns most of the swans in the country, I guess--are tracked and tagged.

A theme does eventually emerge: several of the essays address the way that our ideas of the natural world intersect with the burgeoning forces of nationalism. In more than one piece, Macdonald describes how, during World War II, species that were considered notably "British" became rallying cries for preservation, as if British identity were to hinge on the continued existence of these birds. She makes much of the fact that birds don't know borders, even as they are enlisted in our most parochial disputes about who belongs where. She talks about how immense murmurations of starlings helped develop wartime radar technology, and hapless migrators whose leg tags have been mistaken for spy technology by suspicious powers. This is such an interesting perspective that I found myself longing for a book that might have been--not a collection of brief essays, but a book that develops this theme as fully and insightfully as H is for Hawk.

White Magic by Elissa Washuta

White occultists' fascination with caricatures of Indigeneity turns up in so many corners of New Age, metaphysical, and occult practice. It always has. In the late 1800s, white people asked long-hared Indian spirit maidens to visit seance tables and tell them how to live. In the 1940s, white people visiting a Manitoba residential school offered candy to starving Indigenous children to secure their participation in a study about whether they could, using Indian senses, read researchers' minds.

I don't know what a vibration is. I know that for thousands of years, my people have had an agreement with the salmon that they will allow us to eat them, and every year, in honor of this relationship, we take a fish from the river, kill it, cook it the way we always have, and eat the flesh. This is not magic, black or white: it's tending and care.

Magic is a seductive idea. Astrology, crystals, tarot--these pursuits that seek to locate and harness an influence on human life that exists outside of both the scientific and the religious--remain as popular as ever. They offer, perhaps, the possibility of control when life seems beyond control, not merely because fate is fickle, but because the world is organized to keep control in the hands of some and out of the hands of others. But even the world of magic is not immune from this. In her essay collection, Cowlitz writer Elissa Washuta highlights the double meaning of "white magic," which in one sense represents the way that whiteness has appropriated Native practices--sage, dreamcatchers, etc.--for their own use. A real white magic, a magic that is used for healing, is not just separate from whiteness but opposes it; it works to heal, and the wounds of racism, anti-indigeneity, and sexism are some of the most powerful in existence.

I'm not really the right audience for the "personal essay." There's something about it, and about White Magic specifically, that makes me feel like a voyeur, looking over someone's shoulder while they talk to their therapist. There's an unfinished quality to them that is epitomized in these essays, by which I mean are about the process of self-investigation and discovery, not merely cognizant of the way resolution and closure are elusive, but written before the possibility of resolution and closure even presents itself. If a memoir is in past tense, the personal essay is the present tense. For that reason, the focus of White Magic on Washuta's trauma made me frustrated, made me squirm. That's the point, of course. And it goes without saying that it takes an enormous amount of bravery to be so vulnerable on the page, to write about rape and addiction, and perhaps even more bravery to write about these things with so little distance.

White Magic is suffused with popular culture, and television and internet culture specifically. The process of self-reflection, for Washuta, passes through Tinder, Instagram, Wikipedia, Twin Peaks, Fleetwood Mac, Oregon Trail, and even former Twitter main character "cliff wife": "This never would've happened to me. I would not walk a cliff's edge. I'm afraid of heights. America would love to shove me off. No, actually, America asks me to do it myself." There's a risk of silliness to this, but how many among us can deny that Twitter has an outsized role in the production of our public and private selves? The essays seem to me to avoid clear theses in favor of a style that jumps from these cultural products to the personal and back again, exploring what Washuta calls "synchronicities." Finding oneself in a meme or a YouTube video is not so different than pulling the right card from the tarot deck.

The most successful essay, to me, recounts Washuta's months-long experience as the "writer-in-residence" for the Fremont Bridge in Seattle. Washuta's application was chosen because she wanted to write about the bridge from an indigenous perspective: the bridge passes over a canal that, when built, obliterated a traditional Duwamish meeting place. A Duwamish story says that a river monster once lived in this place, but disappeared; Washuta hoped to discover why it went away. From her perch above canal Washuta looks down superyachts cruising through the place where the Duwamish and the salmon no longer are, and thinks on the ways in which the scarring of the earth overlaps with the scarring of the self, and how the same historical forces are at work. I found White Magic most effective when it is about place, in this essay, but elsewhere also, as when Washuta recounts the story of the sacrificial Native maiden who gives Jenny Jump mountain in her home state of New Jersey its name, or in a playthrough of Oregon Trail II, searching for the indigenous presence in the Cowlitz lands that were taken from her forebears.

At the end of her experience on the bridge, Washuta is forced to admit she has no idea why the river monster went away. She can barely write the piece she was given a stipend to write. She turns to magic to make the spirits in things come back again--a tolerable self, the "twin flame" of love--but the results are yet to be determined there, too. I don't believe in astrology; I don't believe in magic, but these essays made me understand why you would.

Satanic Panic: Pop-Culture Paranoia in the 1980s by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe

While moral panics may appear in new form to deal with evolving fears and anxieties, the enduring cultural legacy of the Satanic Panic era lies in the pop-culture artifacts it produced.  The paperbacks, music, comics, movies, talks shows and religious tracts that argued for or against the Satanic Panic, or that sometimes lampooned it, are unique documents that give you a feel for what it was like to live through the period.  Rather than being dry pieces of socio-cultural history, these artifacts of the era are sill engaging as entertainment when taken at face value, or as kitsch.  Whether they illustrate the fears of parents and authority figures, or take a sympathetic view toward the typical long-haired teenage metalhead, it would be impossible to truly understand the era without them.

Since the summer I've been writing a novel that takes place at the tail end of the "Satanic Panic"--a period during the 1980's and 90's in which widespread beliefs of organized Satanism and ritual abuse produced deep anxiety and paranoia in America and around the globe.  My research for that book has, so far, included Debbie Nathan's account of the McMartin preschool trial, Satan's Silence, and Mara Leveritt's The Devil's Knot, about the conviction of the West Memphis Three.  Satanic Panic is a series of essays about the cause and effect of pop culture on the Satanic Panic era, including movies, music, Dungeons and Dragons, talk shows, and even the infamous mass-published tracts of Christian propagandist Jack Chick.

The essays themselves are an uneven bunch.  Some are sensitive cultural analyses, others polemics, and some are sort of shoddy.  The least interesting keep their tongue firmly in their cheek, convinced that the hysteria around Satanism for the better part of two decades deserves nothing more really then to be laughed, or marveled at.  It was, of course, ridiculous, but it snookered a lot of people, as moral panics still do.  The best of them made me look at familiar tropes in new ways: Kevin Ferguson's essay on technology and Satanism on film, for example, thinks of the Satanic Panic as a reaction to the dwindling authority of not just the traditional home, but of print authority: computers and telephones place authority outside traditional modes of discourse, including the Bible, and locating it in frightening and foreign places.  (I didn't know, actually, that 900 numbers produced their own mini-hysteria about pernicious influences on kids at the time.)

One thing they all have in common is Geraldo.  Alison Lang provides an essay detailing Geraldo's landmark 1988 special Devil Worship, but references to the special itself appear in almost every essay in the collection, demonstrating somewhat implicitly the special's central position in spreading the hysteria.  The special itself, for what it's worth, seems to have been a potboiler and a travesty: ambushing each of its dozens of guests in turn, including serial killers, Ozzy Osbourne, and Anton LaVey's young daughter and leader of the Church of Satan, Zeena Schreck, then pulling away before they could say anything of substance.  As the postscript notes, Geraldo continues to enjoy influence and audience even today: as silly as the panic may seem in retrospect, its purveyors have not disappeared and its consequences have not diminished.

The best essays, though, are the ones by writers who had a stake in the era, so to speak.  I really enjoyed Forrest Jackson's account of his years-long habit of pranking Bob Larson, a Dallas-era radio talk show host and key proponent of the panic.  Jackson, whose affection for Larson's outrageous antics is palpable, called in for years pretending to be a Satanist named Wayne.  Like Jackson, David Canfield's essay about Christian provocateur and supposed former Satanist Mike Warnke comes from a place of affection: Canfield discusses being an acolyte of Warnke's, then being disillusioned as he joined the staff of the Christian magazine Cornerstone, whose expose on Warnke's lies shattered his credibility.  Canfield makes an important point:

It's easy to see in hindsight that these narratives, including the urban myth of the Satanic underground, were effectively a covert horror culture--a way for Christian folks to get those campfires story heebie-jeebies outside the verboten cultural arenas of secular entertainment.  And it wasn't any less entertaining.

When you look at it this way, Canfield and Jackson's complex relationship with Larson and Warnke comes to resemble the entire Christian and paranoiac obsession with Satanism in general.  The parents who obsessed over their teenager's black clothing and frightening music are not so different from the teenager who wore the clothing, and listened to the music: both emerge from a prurient need for release from the conventional.  And yet, when these two manifestations of the same impulse collided, lives were ruined.

The most baffling essay, to me, is Adrian Mack's analysis of HBO's made-for-TV movie Indictment, which was a dramatic reenactment of the McMartin preschool trial of the 1980's.  The McMartins were accused by dozens of children of Satanic ritual abuse, though eventually the public came to agree that they had been the victims of zealous prosecutors and Satanic panic true believers, and they were acquitted.  Indictment came in this after-period, when public opinion had long since settled on the McMartins' side.  To Mack, the bias of Indictment is a distortion of the truth, and while the essay doesn't come out and say that the prosecutors were right, that's what it clearly believes, and it blames HBO, and all the prosecutors' critics, for "sowing doubt about the reliability of witness testimony."

But that's a pretty broad statement: the critics of the McMartin trial don't doubt the reliability of witness testimony, but they do doubt the reliability of young children's testimony, especially those placed under manipulative conditions, as the children in the McMartin case clearly were, and the "expert" testimony of doctors who had not sufficiently researched claims about the way sexual abuse is physically detectable.

To Mack, the bias of Indictment is inexcusable, a pattern of groupthink that diminishes the serious claims of abuse made by children and their parents.  There is a reasonable claim, I think, that public opinion can shift too far, and that the dynamics of hysteria that fomented the McMartin case are the same that unraveled it, and should be treated with similar skepticism.  But the essay treats the McMartin case devoid of context, and fails to even grapple with the idea that public opinion was against the McMartins before it was for them, or that in other cases--like the West Memphis Three, and other day care workers, most of whom have since been released after long prison sentences--public opinion never got the chance to swing the other way.

It's a strange essay in a collection that mostly finds the value in, as the excerpt above says, the "kitsch" of the Satanic Panic era: the most outrageous music, the goriest films, even Christian "white" metal--all of them are as much a product of the Satanic Panic as they are the cause of it.  That is to say, these cultural artifacts are still fun and interesting because they see, clearly and satirically, the stifling and unflappable character of American monoculture.

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William Gass

The privacy which a book makes public is nevertheless made public very privately--not like the billboard which shouts at the street, or the movie whose image is so open we need darkness to cover the clad-ass and naked face that's settled in our seat.  A fictional text enters consciousness so discreetly it is never seen outdoors... from house to house it travels like a whore... so even on a common carrier I can quite safely fill my thoughts with obscene adjectives and dirty verbs although the place I occupy is thigh-sided by a parson.

William Gass' single-essay book, On Being Blue, isn't quite about the color blue.  Well, it is, I guess, but not quite in the way I expected when I got it as a Christmas present.  (From my mother no less-sorry, Mom; I'm not sure either of us knew what was really in here.)  In fact, On Being Blue vacillates between two poles: one, a meditation on the proliferation of the color blue in all its forms and habitations, and the other an investigation into one particular shade of the word "blue"--that is, the blue of blue films and working blue.  That is, obscenity and sex.

Gass' essay is diffident, without a clear purpose or center.  But his style, fluid and exuberant, is worth the price of admission in and of itself, as illustrated by his facility with repetition that ought to make the book's opening a dull sentence indeed:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep hole in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit--dumps, mopes, Mondays--all that's dismal--low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter,which is our signal for getting underway; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasingly absentness of heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for insurance, or, when the sky's turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese... the pedantic, indecent and censorious... watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it's stood for fidelity.

Whew!  That was a beast to type.  But it's an incredible thing to see--Gass clearly takes his cues on how to deal with the repeated word from D. H. Lawrence, who gets special recognition in the essay for his failure to write about sex convincingly.

It's not just Lawrence, though his case is the most tragic--Gass thinks that no one can really write about sex sufficiently.  It's one of the few cogent points that emerge now and then from the essay.  We retreat from sex, literarily speaking, because our efforts to treat it directly are doomed to failure.  So we embrace terms that are emptied of signification because they are the best we can do.  ("When, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless," Gass writes, "I enjoin a small offensive fellow to 'fuck a duck,' I don't mean he should.")  Blue, a color Gass conceives of as taking an especially wide range of meanings and connotations, easily takes on the ineffable connotation of the sexual act.  That's what links the two poles together.

Around this idea, the essay meanders with only a modicum of purpose or organization.  Were Gass' prose itself not so captivating, it would hardly be tolerable.  In contrast, read Michael Gorra's laudatory introduction, which apes, or falls despite itself into an imitation of, Gass' style, but far less effectively.  And the central connection of the book suffers today because, forty years after the essay's writing, we don't really use the word in the same way.  Who calls porn "blue movies" now anyway?  I didn't close On Being Blue feeling especially enlightened, either on sex or the color wheel, but I enjoyed reading it anyhow.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

The fact, or at least the degree, of human exceptionalism is often disputed.  In some quarters it is considered modest and seemly for us to take our place among the animals, conceptually speaking--to acknowledge finally the bonds of kinship evolution implies.  Yet, in view of our history with regard to the animals, not to mention our history with one another, it seems fair to wonder if the beasts, given a voice in the matter, would not feel a bit insulted by our intrusion.  History is the great unfinished portrait of old Adam.  In the very fact of having a history we are unique.  And when we look at it we are astonished.  Only in myth or nightmare could another such creature be found.  What a thing is man.

Say, however, that God is a given, the God of the psalmist and of Jesus.  Then it is possible to claim a dignity for humankind that is assured because it is bestowed on us, that is, because it is beyond even our formidable powers to besmirch and destroy.  Say that the one earthly thing God did not put under our own feet was our own essential nature.  The one great corrective to our tendency toward depredation would be a recognition of our abiding sacredness, since we are both, and often simultaneously, victim and villain.  The divine image in us, despite all, is an act of God, immune to our sacrilege, apparent in the loveliness that never ceases to shine out in incalculable instances of beauty and love and imagination that make the dire assessment of our character, however solidly grounded in our history and our prospects, radically untrue.

I believe in God, and with some trepidation I will admit that I consider myself a Christian.  I don't say that often, and I can recall clearly several instances in which people I know otherwise quite well have been shocked to hear it.  Mostly I keep it to myself, partly because I don't want to be associated with a religious culture that feels to me increasingly shallow, mindless, and vicious.  (Robinson talks about "the growing numbers among our people who have begun to reject [Christianity] as ignorant, intolerant, and belligerently nationalistic, as they might reasonably conclude that it is, if they hear only the loudest voices.")  Partly because a belief in God is increasingly difficult to defend under the hyperrationalist terms that characterize our century.  Partly it is just good, old-fashioned shame.

Robinson's new collection of essays, The Givenness of Things, addresses all of my misgivings directly.  But it's the lack of shame about her that captivates me most; the lack of any sheepishness or need to apologize for this belief.  Robinson happily identifies herself as a throwback, a mainline Protestant with a fondness for the language and ideas of hymnals and prayer books, at a time when that seems an endangered species:

There is a word that fell like a curse on American religious culture--"relevance."  Any number opf assumptions are packed into this word, for example, that the substance and the boundaries of a life can be known, and that they should not be enriched or expanded beyond the circle of the familiar, the colloquial.  We encouraged ourselves to believe that our own small, brief lives were the measure of all things.  Wisdom would have told us that our lives are indeed small and brief, like the billiosn that preceded them and the billions that will follow, but this information was precisely not welcome.  Wisdom would have told us, too, that, by grace of our extraordinary gifts, and theirs, we are heirs to the testimonies of unnumbered generations.  But these gifts, of course, failed the test of relevance, which was a narrow and ungenerous standard, systematically unforgiving of anything that bore the marks of another age, era, or decade.

The Givenness of Things is divided into a number of essays with short titles that promise reflections on broad, if profound topics, like "Grace," "Fear," and "Metaphysics."  The first chapter, "Humanism," recently published in The Nation, shows that each can stand alone.  But the book is really a single essay, with a few key themes that Robinson hits again and again.

First, she objects to rationalist and positivist ways of thinking which deny the reality of much of human experience.  Neuroscience, for example, tries to reduce the very essence of our being to a series of physical, chemical, and electrical interactions, but this is a definition of the real which lops off, wholesale, thousands of years of human culture and learning.  "Our realism," she writes, "distracts us from reality, that most remarkable phenomenon."  But Robinson is far from anti-science; rather, she argues that positivists ignore the implication that the last century of scientific progress have led us to: that our old "nuts-and-bolts physics" is thoroughly insufficient to describe the world.  "The antidote to our gloom," she writes, "is to be found in contemporary science," not least because the strangeness of the new vision of the cosmos--with its multiple dimensions, dark matter, and quantum entanglement--have resurrected the need for a metaphysics that positivism sought to bury.

Second, she argues that we have made a great mistake by removing human beings from the center of the cosmos.  She puts the lie to the humanism of those "secular humanists" who diminish the uniqueness of the human being:

A number of times I have read or heard from the scientists and the rationalists that the brain is a peice of meat.  This being true of the brain, then the brain/mind, the mind/soul, are degraded or dismissed by their being revealed in their actual, brutish nature.  But why limit this insight to the brain?  The entire human person is meat, except where it is bone, no enhancement.  If it is reasonable to say the brain is meat, it is reasonable on the same grounds, the next time you look into a baby carriage, to compliment the mother on her lovely little piece of meat.  I could as reasonably say that pieces of meat come to my classes, sit in the chairs, and gaze at me with something that looks for all the world like interest or indifference.  Whatever else might be said of these living hams and chops and ribs, they seem to bore easily...

More to the point, what is meat?  Complex life.  And what is that?  The universe's greatest mystery.  It is meat that sings and flies and fledges, meat that makes civilizations and pulls them down.

Robinson labors over this point again and again, because as moderns we have trouble believing it, though it seems, by the time she's done, entirely self-evident.  "Our brilliance," she writes, "has shown us grounds for utter humility.  We could vanish into the ether like a breath, leaving nothing behind to say who we were, what we were.  No doubt we will vanish in fact, mere transients in a cosmos that will realize itself over eons.  How astonishing that we know this."  That is, those rationalists who show us how small and insignificant we are in relation to the cosmos often take the wrong lesson, for no ape, bird, plant, or stone has any conception of what its relationship to the cosmos is, or can even conceive of a cosmos.  Even our immense capacity for evil sets us apart, because "[t]here is something inversely godlike in our potential de-creation of the biosphere."

Finally, she argues that the exceptionalism of the human being is at the heart of Christianity.  The book, toward its end, becomes a theological defense of Robinson's conception of Christianity and of Calvinism.  She speaks beautifully and persuasively about the meaning of the Incarnation, which, she argues, isn't so much God taking on a human form as an expression of the way in which human beings, and Being itself, share and have always shared the nature of God:

I have spent all this time clearing the ground so that I can say, and be understood to mean, without reservation, that I believe in a divine Creation, and in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the life to come.  I take the Christian mythos to be a special revelation of a general truth, that truth being the ontological centrality of humankind in the created order, with its theological corollary, the profound and unique sacredness of human beings as such.  The arbitrariness of our circumstance frees me to say that the Arbiter of our being might well act toward us freely, break in on us, present us with radical Truth in forms and figures we can radically comprehend.

As ever, Robinson's careful prose contains its own wonders; only now, typing that passage out, do I notice the exquisite application of the word "radically" to the verb "comprehend."  Of course, that is part of Robinson's argument: comprehension itself is radical, and implies radical things.  I will risk sounding like a fanboy, but I believe there's nothing short of remarkable in Robinson's gift for uniting beautiful ideas with beautiful words.  In that way reading The Givenness of Things is not so different from reading Robinson's fiction.  And as much as I have loved and treasured Housekeeping, Gilead, and Lila, I think perhaps this book has meant the most to me.

Not Less Than Everything, edited by Catherine Wolff

The concept of discipleship is helpful here: obedience to external commands is never enough. Our behavior, our motivation, our identity should reflect the teachings and the example of the one we are following.

Heresy is a tricky thing. Do it right, and you end up Martin Luther, lionized for throwing off the shackles of a legalistic and ungodly institution. Do it wrong, and you end up ostracized, forgotten or, worse, mocked by history, a cautionary tale.

The original blurb for Not Less Than Everything was something along the lines of, “Catholic writers write about their favorite heretics,” and, of course, how could I pass that up? Having read the book, I don’t think the description does it justice, but it was helpful in keeping me in the right mindset--namely that striking out, passively or actively, against the Catholic Church was a big deal. As a Protestant, I can just find a new church. A devout Catholic may believe, like the Whiskey Priest in The Power and the Glory, that excommunicated from the church he's damned. It adds weight to the decisions faced by the various “saints” in the book, not all of which have been--or, in the case of a few, ever will be--beatified. What they have in common, however, is their willingness to put their fate in God’s hands, trusting that following Christ’s example takes precedence over strict adherence to every papal edict.

As in most essay collections, the quality of the writing in Not Less Than Everything varies a fair amount. Some of the essays, such as the one on Max Scheler, are a bit esoteric; others, such as the scintillatingly titled, “A Pastoral, Person-Oriented Theology Worthy of Vatican II”, are just dry. Most, however, take an interesting approach to their subjects without lapsing into hagiography or strict biography. The best essays, in fact, tend to be the ones that treat their subjects as a jumping-off point, like Tom Beaudoin’s essay on Ignatius of Loyola, which he uses to make a larger point about the unstable relationship between critically thinking about one’s religion and blindly accepting it, and Ann Patchett’s The Worthless Servant, which tells a simple but powerful story of a priest who goes out to the highways and byways, giving cold glasses of water in Jesus’ name.

My favorite essay in the collection is the most different. “I Pray I May Be Ready With My Witness” tells of the conversion and struggles of troubled poet John Berryman. Berryman is one of my favorites, and reading about his childhood, his conversion, and his eventual suicide was heartbreaking. It is written by Paul Mariani, who I’d never heard of, and I’d like to close the review with an excerpt:

Protesters were being tried, imprisoned and fined, while others--college students--were being gunned down for refusing to participate any longer in the madness of Vietnam. The homeless were still homeless and the hungry went on being hungry. And, yes, his own body was failing and, yes, he had made mistakes and, yes, he was a human wreck, but he would bear witness in a terrible time as best he could. He hoped and prayed the heretic Origen was right after all and that Hell was “empty / Or will be at apocatastasis,” that is, at the end of time. Human failure--sin--seemed inevitable, given who and what we were. And, yes, no doubt we would suffer for it “now & later / but not forever, dear friends & brothers!”

I like to think of John Berryman as the patron saint of purgatory, shoulders hunched, still climbing on all fours the steep inclines of those mountains toward that distant summit shimmering in light, relieved to know he can sin no more.

Because You Have To: A Writing Life by Joan Frank

I wish I’d read Because You Have To with a highlighter in hand.

Where most books on writing seem to be written by fairly well-known authors or teachers, Joan Frank’s new collection of essays on the writing life comes from a different place, the pen of a writer who has learned, in her own words, “there may not be any breakthrough.” This is a woman who has published five works of fiction, been reviewed in the New York Times, but has come to accept that she may never be a household name, never able to answer the question, which she addresses in an essay, “Have you written anything I’ve heard of?” in the affirmative.

And yet, she continues to write, and write well, because, well, because she has to. Reading her essays felt more relatable to me, a wannabe writer who has published one story and a couple poems, than, say, Stephen King’s On Writing--although it’s good too. There is a compulsion in everyone who calls themselves a writer to create, to put the words down on paper and make them real, and Frank expresses that feeling more eloquently than most. She understands, and communicates, that writing is not about fame, or money, or notoriety. It’s about desire, about an insatiable need to get what’s inside outside. Every writer, famous or not, can relate to that.

Because You Have To isn’t a book on craft, for the most part. It’s more similar to Anne LaMott’s Bird by Bird or Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing. It’s full of advice--or sometimes just empathy--about the mundane things in a writer’s life: rejection letters, finding--or making--a place to write, and feeling as though you must “steal” time from the real world in order to get it down on paper.

Ultimately, what a reader gets from this sort of collection probably depends on what they brought into it. If they don’t write, have no desire to write, they won’t come away with a real understanding of the madness; but anyone who’s felt like they would burst if they didn’t tell their story, well, this one’s for you.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klostermann

"I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation.” —Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life."

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a collection of essays by Chuck Klosterman, probably the most polarizing and visible pop-culture critic currently working. Best known for his spirited defenses of things that are uncool, like Guns n’ Roses and Saved by the Bell, this collection touches on a large variety of topics—everything from tribute bands to the rapture to the titular Cocoa Puffs are subjected to Klosterman’s incisive eye.

Sometimes, he’s contradictory—he decries those who don’t like country in one essay while stating that people who claim to like all music really like no music at all—or just sort of off the wall, like when he claims that mainstream country is more genuine than Bob Dylan. Fortunately, Klosterman mostly avoids abrasive snark, and even the essays I disagree with most vehemently don’t come across as too self important.

The only real complaint I have about this book is the structure. The essays are separate, disconnected entities, but between them, there are little interstitial bits in tiny type, tackling some topic like mathematical probability—Klosterman thinks it’s a crock—or rambling. Sometimes these are comical, but mostly they’re interruptions and represent a pretentious shift in voice for an essayist who’s mostly pretension free.

One of my friends said that he thinks Klosterman is an unusually gifted pop culture commentator but not much else, and based on this collection, I’d tend to agree. There are worse things to be, though, and worse authors with whom to spend an evening.

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

The difference between this situation [forgiving your fellow man] and the one in which you are asking for God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in others, we do not accept them easily enough. As regards my own sins it is a safe bet that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other men’s sins against me it is a safe bet that the excuses are better than I think.

C. S. Lewis is my favorite writer. Like John Updike according to the blurb on the back of my copy of The Weight of Glory, “I read Lewis for comfort and pleasure many years ago, and a glance into the books revives my old admiration.” Everything I desire in non-fiction is present in Lewis’s essays: a consistent but not overbearing authorial voice, a dry sense of humor, and the thoughts of a mind sharp enough to generate thought whether you agree with them or not.

The Weight of Glory is a collection of essays, some of which are adapted from radio addresses Lewis delivered throughout his life. They touch on some the subjects you might expect from Lewis: theology, mythology, Christianity, and some you may not, such as cliques and war. Although it’s true that all these essays end up tying into bigger theological concerns, the smoothness and logic with which Lewis lays out his arguments ought to be an inspiration for Kierkegaards everywhere.

The titular essay concerns itself with the afterlife and the Christian’s response to it. It’s quite powerful and moving, one of the best he ever wrote, and yet the shortest essay in the book, one titled “Forgiveness” was the most impactful on me, saying more in a scant 5 pages than many authors can say in an entire book. The excerpt that opens this review comes from it, and seems to me to be wonderful advice to keep in mind whether you’re a Christian or not.

Ant Farm by Simon Rich

This is Simon Rich's first book. I picked it up after reading his second book, Free-Range Chickens, and laughing myself sick. The style of Ant Farm is the same as Chickens: short, off-the-wall, comedic essays. The topics in Ant Farm range from pen pals to Jesus to time traveling.

From the essay "When Small Talk Goes Wrong"
- Do you have the time?
- Shh! It's 4:26 P.M.!
- Huh?
- (whispering) April twenty-sixth, 4:26 P.M., is an official minute of silence. Congress created it to honor the 426 men who died in the Great Boise Fire. My Father was among those men.
- Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'll stop talking.
- It doesn't matter. The minute has already passed.

Free-Range Chickens by Simon Rich

I picked this book up on a recommendation from Paul Feig. I don't know the last time that I laughed out loud so much while reading a book. The one downside is that Simon Rich is 25/26 years old, has written for The Harvard Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, and has had two books published. A little depressing.

The books is a collection of essays, some no more than a paragraph or two in length. Often times, they are conversations. Think Bob Newhart for our generation. Here is one of my favorites:


Dalmatians
- Hey, look, the truck's stopping.
- Did they take us to the park this time?
- No . . . it's a fire. Another horrible fire.
- What the hell is wrong with these people?

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman

I'll admit that initially I was a bit thrown by the phrase "familiar essays" on the front of this book. I thought that maybe this was a collection of commonly told fables or something akin to that. I didn't realize that the familiar essay is a type of essay. In my defense, they are not as common as they used to be. However, I would imagine that I have read some and didn't even know it.

Historically, these essays often had titles like "On Boating" or "On Politics Being a Masculine Arena." They were meant to be informative, while at the same time highlighting pertinent personal experiences of the author. Fadiman explains some of this in the preface, and by the time I was through the first two or three essays, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on things. It helped that Fadiman's second essay was about Charles Lamb, a favorite of hers, and a prolific writer of familiar essays in the 18th century.

A key aspect to all of these essays is that they draw heavily from Fadiman's life. The first essay of this collection, "Collecting Nature," is largely about her and her brother's near obsession with lepidoptery when they were kids. But she uses this as a springboard to discuss Darwin, the history and methods of collecting nature, natural selection, and even Vladimir Nabokov.

On occasion Fadiman totally immerses herself in a topic. While writing her essay on ice cream, she ate copious amounts of the frozen treat. (Incidentally, this was one of my favorite essays. It concluded with a recipe for making ice cream with liquid nitrogen.) The topic of "Night Owl" was insomnia, and she only worked on this essay during the night. Numerous cups of joe were consumed while writing "Coffee." You get the idea.

I did not find a single one of these essays lacking. However, there were some that I particularly liked, no doubt owing to their topics. The essay about mail was great. I enjoyed learning what mail was like in Great Britain before the creation of the stamp. Fadiman brings the essay up to roughly the present, admitting her reluctance to use email -- something which she eventually overcame. "A Piece of Cotton" was a thoughtful meditation on the U.S. flag, its history, its many interpretations, and its use in popular culture. "Under Water" was the last essay in this collection. It was also the shortest. Here Fadiman recounts the death of a fellow rafter during a trip down the Green River in western Wyoming.

Fadiman has an amazing way with words. The time I spent reading this book was delightful.

If I Only Knew Then... compiled by Charles Grodin

Perennial funny man Charles Grodin tapped a bunch of his friends and acquaintances for help with this book. It is a collection of essays, ranging from 1 page to 20+ pages. Each contributor was asked to write about a mistake they made and what they learned from it. Some of the contributors rose to the prompt put to them by Grodin. They dug back into their past, bared their souls, reopened old wounds, and came up with something really meaningful and poignant. However, many of the contributors evaded Grodin's question, and not always artfully. Some of these dodgers wrote essays that were incredibly self-serving, such as Martin Sheen and Nancy Grace. Some wrote essays that were about near mistakes instead of actual mistakes. Some did not write much of anything at all. This was my main complaint about the book -- there were quite a few essays that did not serve the purpose of the book for one reason or another.

I was surprised by two things about this book. First off, I expected it to be funny. Grodin wrote the preface and contributed one essay, neither of which were even slightly humorous. That was unexpected. Paul Newman saying that he has learned nothing from his mistakes was pretty funny, and there were a few other amusing essays. But for the most part, the book was not funny. It wasn't meant to be.

The second surprise came from Rosie O'Donnell, who turned in my favorite essay of the book, which is weird because I really don't like Rosie. I find her incredibly annoying and grating. For this reason, I reread her essay a few days after I finished the book, just to make sure that is wasn't some weird state of mind that affected my opinion of the essay. If that was the case, then the weird state of mind must have been a lingering one, because I liked the essay just as much the second time.

This book has some interesting insights and truly offers some good advice. It is too bad that it's hampered by so many lackluster essays.

Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor

I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.

The above quote perfectly sums up this book. Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion and Lake Wobegon fame, sets out to explain why he is a Democrat, by interweaving stories from his life and the history of the Democratic party. He writes about his parents and how the WPA helped them pull themselves up after the depression, his going to college on a government grant, and his encounters with average people in Minnesota.

The book amounts to nothing more than the ruminations of an old man, but the thing is this old man is a writer and a thinker. He is someone worth listening to. He has great thoughts about what it means to be a citizen of the United States and insights into the psyche of a Democrat. Keillor even attempts to figure out what goes on in the minds of Republicans, with comic effect. Keillor was raised in a religious home. This upbringing left an indelible mark on him, one that guides his actions and informs who is is to this day. This early imprint can be seen all throughout this book. And of course, Keillor's unmistakable wit is present, making Homegrown Democrat a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Homegrown Democrat is not a diatribe against the Republican party, although Keillor is never reluctant to take them to task. It is an impassioned celebration of old-time democratic (lowercase D) values.

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

I have had a few people tell me that of Sedaris' books, this is their least favorite. Some described it as "not nearly as good as his other books," or stated that it "mostly sucks." That is very likely the reason that I waited so long to read it. After completing Barrel Fever, I can now say two things: 1.) I have read all of Sedaris' books, and 2.) the people who told me that this book was not good were just wrong.

Barrel Fever is split up into two parts. Short stories make up the first section, which is about three fourths of the book. The last fourth is essays, what have now become the standard fair of Sedaris. While the essays were good, I particularly enjoyed the short stories, especially "Glen's Homophobia Newletter Vol. 3, No. 2," "Don's Story," and "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!"

Published in 1994, Barrel Fever was Sedaris' first book. Naked was the follow-up, and it contained no short stories. Since these stories were obviously completely fictional, they allowed Sedaris to create some interesting characters and situations that he isn't normally able to deal with. I would be interested in why he stopped including short stories in his books.

Barrel Fever did not disappoint in the slightest.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

I got this as an early birthday present. It was good that I received it early, because I would have purchased it on my own before my birthday (July 15, and if you are wondering, no, I still don't have an iPod Touch). I was super excited about this book and had to force myself to read it slowly, so as to not finished it in the first day. I think that I did a fairly good job, managing to spread it out over six days.

As with most of Sedaris's books, Flames covers a wide variety of topics, with essays that deal with various periods in Sedaris's life. It would be stupid for me to try and pick a favorite, but I really enjoyed "In the Waiting Room," in which Sedaris explains why it can be a problem to know so little French that you are reduced to saying yes in response to everything. The phrase Sedaris uses actually translates to, "I am in agreement." Due to his excessive use of this phrase, he finds himself in his underwear in a waiting room that slowly begins to fill with other people, all fully dressed of course.

Each essay is somewhere around fifteen pages in length with a few exceptions, chief among these is the final essay, "The Smoking Section," which was a little over eighty pages. Comprised of journal entries, this essay follows Sedaris all the way to Tokyo on his quest to quit smoking. At the same time that he is trying to break this 30-year habit, Sedaris is attempting to learn Japanese. In true Sedaris fashion, he does not allow his apparent inability to learn Japanese to stop him from pointing out all the English errors that are made by those around him and on local signage. I couldn't stop laughing at all the language-based snafus. One of my favorites was a label Sedaris found on pre-packaged sandwiches in a supermarket close to his apartment. "We have sandwiches which you can enjoy different tastes. So you can find your favorite one from our sandwiches. We hope you can choose the best one for yourself."

I have read everything by Sedaris except for Barrel Fever, which I started last night. His humor has a darkness to it that really appeals to me. One of the blurbs on the back of Flames describes Sedaris as a writer who is "revising our ideas about what's funny." This description is right on the money.

My thoughts on Sedaris's Naked and Barrel Fever

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

Like the other collections of essays I've reviewed this year, How to Be Alone doesn't lend itself to easy reviewing. It's made up of a series of essays that Franzen wrote between 1995 and 200o-something, and they cover topics ranging from his father's slow descent into Alzheimers, to some of the unbelivable oversights of the US Postal Service, to the ubiquity of sex-help books.

I found the essays in the collection quite moving and interesting for the most part. The running theme throughout is a loss of privacy and personality in a modern world, but the essays rarely seem curmudgeonly. The exception is his essay on literature in which he direly predicts that the novel will be virtually extinct within a few years, a bit of a paranoid reaction to have immediately before hitting it big with The Corrections. And, speaking of that book, the first essay about his father's disease makes it clear just how personal much of that work was. My favorite essays, however, were the one about the derelict postal service in inner city Chicago, and 'Reading in Bed,' the bes essay on sex in the public life that I've read.

If you enjoy essays (or if you liked The Corrections, as I did) you'll probably enjoy How to Be Alone. At least check out 'Reading in Bed.'

Naked by David Sedaris

A few years back I caught David Sedaris on The Late Show. Letterman asked him if he would like to read an excerpt from his then-current book, Me Talk Pretty One Day. It was the first ever reading on The Late Show. I forget the passage that Sedaris read, but I remember thinking that it was really funny and deciding that I would read the book. From there I hopped around his bibliography, with no particular design or order.

While I remember enjoying Me Talk Pretty One Day – it was good enough to make me want to read more by Sedaris – it is not my favorite of his. Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim are vying for that position. Invariably, the essays that I find the most enjoyable are the ones that involve Sedaris childhood, and as a logical extension, his family. And essays of this nature are in abundance in both Naked and Dress Your Family. The interaction between young Sedaris and his siblings, especially Amy and Lisa, never fails to make me laugh.

In the essay “True Detective”, Sedaris describes how his mom and his older sister, Lisa, would watch detective shows on TV and then try to put what they had learned from these boobtube gumshoes to use, attempting to solve real crimes they came across in the local paper. “‘We know that the girl was held at knifepoint on the second floor of her house,’ Lisa said, tapping the pencil against her forehead. ‘So probably the person who robbed her was…not in a…wheelchair.’” Sedaris describes the fictional detective world that his sister and mother were so enamored with as, “a world of obvious suspects. Looking for the axe murderer? Try the emotionally disturbed lumberjack loitering near the tool shed behind the victim’s house. Who kidnapped the guidance counselor? Perhaps it’s the thirty-year-old tenth-grader with the gym bag full of bloody rope.”

Although I find Sedaris’ essays hilarious, I would not necessarily describe them as laugh-out-loud funny. There is a difference between Sedaris’ writing and that of Michael J. Nelson, and even Paul Feig. The humor in Sedaris’ essays builds slowly. Sedaris doesn’t rely on jokes or oneliners, but rather uses his cunning wit and vocabulary to describe the situations that he gets himself into. “Painfully humorous” is an apt way to describe his style. Sedaris mines humor in fairly serious situations such as, a horribly racist speech given by one of his grade school teachers when it was announced that their school would be integrated, a prostitute being beaten up a few days before Christmas, and even his mother’s death.

Sedaris is a excellent writer and a top-shelf humorist. I hope that he releases another book before I read Barrel Fever, thus exhausting his current oeuvre.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Well, I read this book about a week before Kelly posted it, and seeing as it's a colection of essays, his review sums them up pretty well. I agree with him on pretty much every point, including that 'Six to Eight Black Men' is the funniest essay in the book. A close runner up is 'Blood Work,' wherein Sedaris the housecleaner is mistaken for Sedaris, the erotic housecleaner. Hilarity, of course, ensues.

Of all of Sedaris' books I've read (which is everything but Me Talk Pretty One Day), this one was the funniest and most consisent. So if you like David Sedaris, read it. If you don't, read something else.