Sarah Vowell’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Given recent electoral outcomes, reading essays about American political history probably doesn’t sound particularly appealing, but I found going into This American Life regular Sarah Vowell’s back catalog to be very refreshing. She writes with a casual persona, a conversational tone that communicates her obsessiveness and fascination with both self-awareness and contagious enthusiasm.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot is a celebration of nerdishness, written at a time before that kind of thing had been so widely co-opted to pander and to sell sitcoms and t-shirts. There’s a sense of guilty revelry at play -the delight Vowell clearly feels in immersing herself in the historical remnants of upsetting episodes in history are contextualized but never dismissed. The essays are informative, but couched in a sense of personal experience that keeps them from getting overly dry. I’m a big fan of this particular strategy in nonfiction, especially in travel writing.

I’ve got some conflicting thoughts on the place of essay collections in 2016, in the world of aggregated longform essays and creative nonfiction. One one hand, I feel like my time is better spent casting a wide net, reading a diverse selection of authors writing on a diverse selection of topics. But, for the same reason I like short story collections, I like getting inside and inhabiting one specific writer’s brain over the course of a few small pieces. I’m not sure how much of that is coming from my own writerly inclinations to observe other writers’ voices in depth and how much it has to do with simply valuing an accurate and close reading of somebody else’s lived experience, but there you go.

“Time and Distance Overcome” by Eula Biss

This is easily the best essay collection I’ve read this year. I had previously encountered Biss reading Volume 1 of Best Creative Nonfiction, as well as on the wonderful podcast Book Fight, which I have recommended before and plan to again. Her work always stood out to me, but there’s a lot of good writing out there, and it took me a while to get to her. The project of reading fifty female authors this year probably expiated that, and I’m glad.

These essays deal with identity, specifically the search for identity in race and nationality. Biss, who is white, has grown up with black family members, and has developed a nuanced and piercing sense of racial examination. Whether she is pondering her time as a teacher in Harlem, examining her own role in the gentrification of a mixed Chicago neighborhood, or feeling shame at her American identity in a Mexican border town, she cuts through the obfuscatious bullshit and forces both herself and her readers to face some profoundly unpleasant truths.

While this description may sound like some unpleasantly sanctimonious lefty academic hand-wringing, the only thing it has in common with that unfortunate genre of academic writing is its subject. In the title essay, Biss talks about the history of lynching in America within the context of the invention of the telephone and the implementation of the ubiquitous poles that made phone lines possible, and their inevitable incorporation into the systemic terrorizing and murder of black men. It’s a masterful piece of writing that is simultaneously approachable enough for me to teach it to my 8th grade class (most of who read at least a few grades levels below 8th grade) and dense enough to not only stand up to a half-dozen readings, but to thrive under that degree of scrutiny, offering greater nuance and detail.

Recommendation: Buy this book. If you are undecided, read the essay mentioned above (link below).

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102235226#102237046

Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed

This was probably the most intellectually challenging book I’ve read all year. Translated from the French, it’s a massive essay on a broad range of topics including but not limited to: Continental European music of the last hundred years, authorial intent, friendship, the evolution of the novel, Kafka, Stravinsky, translation and the role of the translator, conducting and the role of the conductor, Janacek, the difference between satire and irony and the inherent temporal blindness of the human condition. These concepts build on each other in complex interlocking matrices, supporting each other like an elaborate living latticework. The more you know about Continental novelists and composers, the easier the read will be. At the very least, you need to have a passing familiarity with Kafka and have a general understanding of the history of Europe in the last hundred years. Even with the requisite background information, it’s a tough read.

Near the end of the book, he touches on  “trials” (held in the court of public opinion) in general, and specifically by the desire to make a “bastard” out of an artist or thinker at the center of a scandal, to demonize both the creator and the creation because of the creator’s unpopularity (being on the wrong side of history, being unlikable or caustic in private life, having supported the wrong people or movements). Kundera’s perspective is drawn heavily from the post-fascist and post-communist history of mainland Europe, but it’s characteristic and representative of a larger, human tendency: the need to demonize, to accuse, and condemn the offensive. We feel a need to find out who the demons and the bastards are so that we can condemn them loudly and publicly. Their alleged sins -lately- might be misogyny, homophobia, or racism. We take things out of context and take the speaker to task, boycotting anything they are involved in. Like the European tribunals and the American trials of the Red Scare, we de-contextualize while we equate the maker with his media. Everything is offensive. If so many people are incapable of picking up on satire, Kundera asks, what hope does the author or artist have that his sense of irony will be picked up? If a nasty word is ontologically offensive, then so is every subversive use of the same word.

It’s impossible to even communicate a sense either of the overall ideas in this book or any single specific one; everything is so interconnected. Any thoughts must be pruned to such an extent in order to be removed from their context within the book that they will be almost unrecognizable. Testaments Betrayed is a challenge, but only because it’s insightfulness is so densely packed.