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Summary: is the essay back?
Review: d'agata's first book is a bona fide masterpiece of nonfiction. pure and simple, 'halls' is a weave of the mythology of america, the oddest vines of human nature, and the poetry in mundane and great earths alike. i thought his 'martha graham' piece, which utilizes architecturally the same basic scattered-card-like narrative used throughout this book, was brilliant when i first read it years ago, but the book's centerpiece, 'an essay about the ways in which we matter', adds mind-blowing to that.
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Summary: A Pleasant Surprise to Say the Least
Review: But, the book was a gift and already inscribed by mygirlfriend, so I figured I should at least try reading it. Surprisingly, it's touching. The writer's not only interested in pointing out the stupid and obviously weird aspects of his subjects' lives (a guy who claims to be the president of "The International Flat Earth Society", another guy who stows away on a bus tour to Hoover Dam and refuses to leave once he gets there, someone who's built a hall of fame to burlesque dancing in the Californian desert...you get the picture) but he's interested also in trying to figure out WHY they're stupid and weird, or more importantly what specifically the president of the flat earth society believes in, why he bothers, how his search is important to us. Etc. It's a cool book--humorous and empathetic at the same time, somehow. And in the end I even came to see the need for all the variations in how these stories are told, so that the white space in this book (and there's a LOT of white space in this book) wasn't just a gimmick.Nicely done I must say.
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Summary: wicked act of imagination
Review: This one goes straight into the "not like any other book" category. It's difficult going, but a pay-off too because it's completely entrancing and intriguing. I'm dazzled by D'Agata's imagination, and I'm dying to see what he does next!
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Summary: This is what an MFA should do for you.
Review: Or this is what John D'Agata does for the MFA. Remember this name. Like many other graduates of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop it will one day have Pulitzer Prize attached to it. Halls of Fame will become standard study in writing programs across the country. As cerebral and rewarding as Deborah Eisenberg without the laborious density. As magical and novel-like as John McPhee only with interesting subjects.
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Summary: Did D'Agata ask all his friends to put reviews online?
Review: Did I read the same book? This is pretentious and trivial writing. Nothing in it is fresh or new. Oh. A list of all the things in one Hall of Fame. How clever. Just a list. And, wow, he tells us how many degrees it was every day when he was somewhere that was hot. How original! I spent most of the time reading the book wondering what the point was. Alternately disorienting, self congratulatory, and often simply repetitive, I found this book to be hinding behind the label "experimental non-fiction." Any criticism of it--like this review--gets dismissed as being a bad sport or not being clever enough to understand the mastery of the experimental writer. Form is hard; doing anything you want is easy. The only people who will like this book are fellow experimental writers, D'Agata's family and friends, and the entire circle of elite who think that everyone else is too dumb to get what this book is "about." Whatever.
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Summary: A little genius envy at Columbia?
Review: The composers of the old, binaric (either/or), and obsolete canons always claimed to write about the truths of conversation, relationship, integration, and Paradox (both/and). Yet their output and their lives exposed their genuine lack of comprehension. Their cognizance and profundity were false. Paradox is the truth. Paradox -- the accomodation of the self and the other -- is within and without. It is not the small, often non-represented, dot of the yin yang image. It is essential, central and marginal to one's core. John D'Agata's work accomodates the self and the other in one entity, as is should be. Paradox is the future; it is what has always been, whether we admit it or not. Read John D'Agata if you want to learn who you really are; skip him if you don't.
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Summary: an annec carson for the rest of us
Review: If you love Anne Carson but wish she made sense more than a quarter of the time, then this is the book for you!
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Summary: a doomsday review
Review: here's a prediction: this book doesn't stand a chance. why? because readers in america simply aren't going to know what to do with it.
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Summary: Mr. Zeitgeist
Review: John D'agata's is the coolest voice (although I hate that word "voice") on the American scene I've come across in years. Nonfiction isn't my main area of interest, I'm a filmmaker. But like documentary films by Errol Morris say, this book seems to want to turn the bland stuff of nonfiction into art, legitmate, soaring art. Besides Paul Thomas Anderson's epic collage like structure in MAGNOLIA, another gen-xer with a unique voice (ugh!) I haven't seen anything that was this contemporary, entertaining, fresh or bold in years. You simply must read this to consider yourself part of the culture, friends.
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Summary: Pleeease
Review: First of all, John D'Agata is not the second coming. These reviews are way over the top. Second of all, the book is unbalanced. There's everything from journalism in here to poetry (supposed poetry at least). And third of all, his bio says he's from the oh-so-prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, an institution that is hardly known for producing "cutting edge literature," as Publisher's Weekly would have us believe. (Of course, unless it's the self-serving kind from pretentious writers like Mark Levine or trendy hacks like Joshua Clover.) The book is competent: nothing more, nothing less.
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