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Tag Archives: nonfiction
Revisiting "Seven Wonders"
I just read an article on newly discovered sea creatures that reminds me of a wonderful little essay by Lewis Thomas. The essay’s titled “Seven Wonders.” Everybody should read it. It appears in Lewis’s collection, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a title that fits rather nicely with our latest List of the Week.
My first encounter with “Seven Wonders” was as an undergraduate at Southeast Missouri State University in a class taught by Dr. Gaskins, an insightful writer and writing center director who years later would chair my thesis committee. I’m grateful he made our class read it. It’s a list essay, and in the spirit of the list, here are three reasons “Seven Wonders” is remarkable.
For one, it’s a great example of personal writing supported by science (or would it be science decorated with personal writing?) — a tricky negotiation, as anyone who’s graded freshman composition essays will agree. The blending of evidence with opinion is elegant, and the authority steering the piece is unquestionable. Absent altogether are the usual gear-stripping shifts between what the author knows from personal observation and what is known to science at large.
For two, it’s a refreshing example of a literary artifact by a writer who’s into more than just being a writer and doing writerly things. Why refreshing? Because a lot of writers nowadays — even the very good ones — are kicking it FUBU-style. Maybe that sprung from the “write what you know” movement. I’m not sure. In any case, there are a whole lot of poems about writing poetry, and a whole lot of stories about English teachers trying to publish their stories, and a whole lot of essays about writers and about writing. We’re drawing creative nourishment from ourselves, and after a while, it sort of feels like we’ve become characters in a castaway movie, stuck on a raft together and drinking our own pee. In “Seven Wonders,” Thomas shows that a writer with varied interests and separate areas of expertise is invigorating to read. He makes a convincing case that this approach to writing is much healthier overall.
Reason number three — and this seems like a silly reason “Seven Wonders” is a remarkable list essay — is that it’s a list essay that’s remarkable. There have been other successful attempts at this kind of writing; Brian Arundel’s “Things I Have Lost” over at Brevity is one noteworthy example. Generally, though, most list essays read like responses to exercises in self help books, lacking the curiosity and … well … wonder that makes Thomas’s essay endearing. In just a couple of pages he inspires a feeling that life on Earth is miraculous and special. Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything, inspires the same feeling, only decades later, and in a few hundred more pages. What Thomas achieved is the primary function of the list: rank things concisely, creating structure through categorization. He takes it a step farther with his insight, conveyed through his exquisite knack at explaining.
Got a Seven Wonders list of your own? You know we want to see it.
Advice for an ERA
Time to address a seldom discussed but alarmingly common trend I’ve noticed in creative nonfiction submissions — a specific kind of essay I call the Embarrassing Restroom Adventure.
The details of ERAs vary widely, limited only by the number of ways going to the bathroom can go horribly wrong. Still, almost all ERAs follow the same basic trajectory: narrator enters restroom and gets comfortable; narrator notices that something isn’t quite right (the door won’t lock, the toilet paper’s gone, etc.); someone else shows up and suddenly there’s a big, embarrassing mess; narrator cleans it up, vowing to avoid similar situations in the future.
If one were to bust into the mail room of any literary journal that accepts essays, steal all the submissions, scatter them randomly over a five-acre plot, and stroll back across it blindfolded, guaranteed that person would step in a couple ERAs. I’ve been a reader for three literary journals, TMR included, and I can report that ERAs show up pretty often — about as often as essays about losing a pet or experimenting with sex or illegal drugs, but not quite as often as essays about cheating on a spouse, living with a debilitating illness, or attempting to finally reconcile things with mom or dad.
The impulse to commit the ERA to paper is easy to understand, but hard to resist. They are stories told to make our close friends laugh, and in that sense they’re practically failsafe. If ERAs were employees in a corporate workplace, they would be low-level sales reps, the funny, jokey kind that bristle with personality and form quick rapports with others — and they’re great at their jobs. So great, in fact, that it will be suggested by others that they be promoted. “That’s a hilarious story, dude,” friends will say of the ERA. “You should totally write it down!” And in a move familiar to anyone who’s ever done corporate work, this promotion will remove the low-level ERA employee from a position where it almost can’t fail and install it in a higher position where it almost can’t succeed.
In an ERA, the speaker assumes a position where there’s trouble but not danger, where taboo is flirted with but not violated, and where the audience is invited to laugh and sympathize but isn’t called upon to reevaluate or challenge. The subject matter’s universality makes it immediately accessible, so very little setup is required to contextualize the story up front besides where and how long ago it occurred. An ERA provides ample opportunity for the use of awesome literary devices like narrative suspense and colorful exaggeration, which are tricky to pull off in other personal writing endeavors.
What’s really tricky, though, is making a case for an ERA’s literary value. While the story might be immediately accessible, there are also a lot of readers who will immediately choose not to access it. The purpose — to entertain — could be misinterpreted as an attempt to shock. Humor takes a privileged position, making insight and reflection secondary, and pretty soon the reader questions whether the piece should have been written at all.
Then there’s the fact that there are so many ERAs floating around, and I admit I’m personally to blame for some of that. My Masters thesis is clogged with ERAs. I dropped an ERA on my creative writing workshop just last year. I can no more explain why I wrote so many — surely was aware I wasn’t breaking new ground — than I can explain why going to the bathroom without incident is hard.
I still cheer for just about every ERA manuscript I get, and I pass my share of ERAs up the chain. However, take note: No ERA I’ve passed has ever been accepted for publication. Likewise, none of the ERAs I’ve sent out have ever been published.
Therefore, my advice to anyone planning to write an ERA is this:
Make it very good. Make the language captivating and the scenes vivid, but don’t be gross. Don’t let it even approach shock value. Don’t cuss. Make it so funny that it validates its own existence, but not so funny that the humor overshadows whatever insight it arrives at — which, incidentally, had better be more breathtaking than “…and that’s why I’ll make sure and go at my house next time.” Make it somehow touching but not emotionally gooey. Make it bigger than the confines of its situation without allegorically implying that life itself is a toilet.
Most importantly — and I think this goes for all essays — make the engine behind it be powered by something other than just the circumstances, because circumstances can seldom ever be unique, but with some careful thought, accounts of them can.
"Blazingly Honest Subjective Truth"
Last week, author Cheryl Strayed started a thread on her Facebook page about the state of book reviews. Strayed felt that reviews of memoirs aren’t just saying whether or not the book is worth reading, but that no matter what, the critic takes the time to bash the entire genre. Even in positive reviews, Strayed found that the critic will state how the book is “so unlike most memoirs,” suggesting that good memoirs are not really like most memoirs, i.e., the genre of memoir stinks. The thread is over 100 comments long now, with heavy hitters like Ned Stuckey-French, Robin Romm, Matthew Batt, Debra Monroe, and Stephen Elliott (to name just a few) chiming in with their thoughts.
A few years ago, Cynthia Ozick wrote in Harper’s about an ongoing public argument between Jonathan Franzen (his famous “Why Bother?” essay) and Ben Marcus. Ozick concluded that the problem for these men—who were discussing, to greatly oversimplify, what fiction can and should do—is that there is a general lack of good criticism. Without good book critics to help readers determine what was worth reading in contemporary literature, writers like Franzen and Marcus (and all of us as readers) would continue to be frustrated by attempting and failing to decipher, through all the noise of the modern world, what was worthy of our reading time.
One of the only rules we have about blog content here at the Missouri Review is this: don’t be negative. That’s not to say to avoid criticism—not at all—but to not be a pugnacious jerk just for the sake of doing so. An example? Try this review of four memoirs by critic Neil Genzlinger. In this omnibus review, he eviscerates three of the four memoirs. When in the first sentence of your review, you hope for people to shut up, as Genzlinger does, I mean, you aren’t exactly getting off to a generous start, right? This is exactly the kind of vitriolic reviewing that concerns Strayed.
As a reader, I learned nothing from Genzlinger’s review. There are too many mediocre books? There are memoirs that are self-indulgent? Is anyone surprised by either of these things? Genzlinger’s article is a perfect example of what Charles Baxter has labeled “owl criticism”:
Americans don’t like critics or their criticism. We are openly hostile towards reviewers and critics. The word “critic” has such a negative connotation that you might as well call a book reviewer “terrorist” or “pedophile.” As Americans, for a long time, we have taken a “I know what I know” attitude towards, well, just about everything, and now that social media provides the opportunity for everyone to showcase his or her “knowledge,” we dismiss book critics (or cultural critics, social critics, etc.) as being elitist and protecting the status quo.
Let’s agree that the general state of book criticism is not in great shape, even if there are some very good book critics and thinkers out there. Why does memoir seem to set critics off? Strayed wrote that memoir is after the “blazingly honest subjective truth.” The complexity of those four words put together sounds perfect to me: it seems straightforward but in fact puts a tremendous responsibility on both the writer and the reader.
She is suggesting something that is, I think, an intriguing challenge that leads to some confusion. One commenter on Cheryl’s thread said that memoir “fails as accurate journalism”; another wondered aloud why there so many disclaimers in memoir. These seem to go hand in hand for me. Why so many disclaimers? Well, that one is easy: lawsuits. This is America, right?
The former comment, however, is what is really troubling, and suggests a concern with memoir that cannot easily be dismissed. Memoir and journalism are not the same. At all. To me that’s like comparing my filing cabinet to a bowl of grapes. It just doesn’t make any sense. But what the commenter is after, I think, is a criticism of memoir that is philosophical: what is true? What in your narrative is real? What actually happened here?
Now that is a great, big, huge, tremendous, gargantuan question and there are many people much smarter than me that struggle mightly, on a daily basis, with that very idea. What I sense is a desperate desire for truth and an inability to know how to find it. Tuesday, I watched five minutes of some CNN show called “In The Arena,” during which E.D. Hill interviewed Rep. Dennis Kucinich. I won’t bore you with the details, but both showed a remarkably lack of understanding (or interest in understanding, or even an interest in pretending they had an understanding) of presidential power and military intervention in Libya. They couldn’t care less as long as they got their talking points and soundbites in.
Well, that’s really frustrating, isn’t it? Especially when substance over style, celebrity over content, product over art, begins to permeate book culture, too. Right, Laura Miller? As one commenter on Cheryl’s thread noted: “Good memoir is not self-aggrandizement or narcissism.” And, yet, many critics seem to view memoir as inherently narcissistic without even reading the book. In a world that is increasingly complex and polemic, any claim on a narrative as a “true story” is instantly met with hostile distrust.
I think this generally points to a culture that is illiterate. Yes: illiterate. A culture awash in conspiracy theories and political correctness and “deniability,” mixed with a failing education system, leads to confusion and anger. Why is this book “based on actual events” rather than “true”? Why aren’t those definitions clear? What am I to make of this? These type of complaints – and others you’ve certainly heard – rejects complexity for the sake of simplicity. That’s dangerous. That’s dangerous for writers and readers. And, yeah, for book critics, too.
One of my favorite writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, said the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. With the sheer amount of information available to us, and the ability to access that information almost immediately, this is increasingly challenging to do. Book critics still have a valuable role to play in what we read in contemporary literature. Good critics have a responsibility to attempt something greater than Owl Criticism. And as readers, we have a responsibility to call them out for it.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review.