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Summary: ......and There Was Morning!
Review: This book is beyond description. I can tell you that this author is doing things with (or to) the English language that have never been done before at such length. It's definitely not "essays." And most people won't want to call it a novel either. It's a book--let's call it that! It's cumulative effects are stunning. The author has completely conceived a world out of light and dark, fame and folly, immortality and death..... To be completely honest I have only read about a hundred pages of it so far, but if the rest holds up to what I've seen so far I'm going to have to pace myself so it doesn't end too fast! I live in the part of the country that the author seems to be most fascinated with, the Americanm West, and specifically Las Vegas, and can tell you that as a devotee of the new American fascination with this town, I haven't read anything as smart, or fair, and intentionally UNsensational as the author's magnum opus about the lights here called 'And There Was Evening And There Was Morning'. How he got permission to climb into the peak of the Luxor Hotel to write about it's iconic beam of light I'll never know (actually he explains his deceptive strategies in the book), but he's definitely made an impression on me. This is a must read, especially for readers bored with contemporary criticism or whatever this kind of writing will be called.
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Summary: At last!
Review: At last! Someone who knows that the Essay is not only dead, but is literature that rivals the storytelling techniques of fiction, and the musical pacings of the poem. Like his essays have been doing, John D'Agata's debut collection is changing--literally--the way we write and read essays in America! He's created a literature for the ravenous pack-rats in all of us who love beauty, love facts, love strangeness, love lists, and most of all love writing that captures these spirits in its style. Before the poets claim them for themselves--which seems inevitable--John D'Agata is ours! The next great essayist in American letters--"redefining the American essay," as Annie Dillard says. So cool!
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Summary: both poetry and prose
Review: This is poetry, in that it is beautiful and uses words economically, sometimes metrically too, but this is prose, in that his stories read as easily as a novel and always tell an engaging story. Mr. Johnson in "The Flat Earth Map" and Martha Graham in "Audio Description of" are wonderfully precise protagonists. The writer has a quality something like Joyce or Kafka, and yet not like them too, because the writing is always grounded in the actual; his surrealism is actually just an absurd kind of realism then. With the best qualities of nonfiction, HALLS OF FAME is not broodingly self-absorbed, but observant and thoughtful, using examples from the writer's own life as just extra examples to add to the pot of the stories.The notes seem like an after-thought though, and I'm not sure what to do with them as a reader. They're easy ignore, I guess.
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Summary: This Is Not Your Father's Nonfiction
Review: Startling...breathtaking...new. One the most audacious nonfiction debuts in years. Period.
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Summary: A Tour de Force from a Gifted Young Writer
Review: In _Halls of Fame_ John D'Agata exudes the confidence and free-spirit typical of a twenty-something, while at the same time he has the sharp analytical skills of an older more experienced writer. Someone has compared this young man to Anne Carson and indeed the influence of poetry over this work is obvious, but I kept thinking about the razor-sharp writing of Joan Didion's essays as I was reading _Halls of Fame_. The way this author fashions his words is unlike anything I've read recently, certainly unlike anything I've read by any writer near John D'Agata's age, and definitely unlike anything else that calls itself a collection of essays. Poetic, poignant, evocative, smelling of the underside of American life, _Halls of Fame_ tells the story of a young man but does so through the stories of others. If for anything else, THIS is what sets the book, and its author, apart from its peers: raised on memoir and the "Real World" and "Jerry Springer," generation x seems convinced that navel-gazing makes for great literature. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But this book wants to at least offer a sparkling glimpse at the alternative.
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Summary: An eloquent glance into the American absurd
Review: There's an essay in this book about an artist whose work I started following a few years ago after I saw an exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum. His name is Henry Darger, a brilliant, reclusive painter who created an entire alternative universe for himself populated by young, blondhaired, nude girls with penises. Yes, Darger was disturbed! So disturbed that when he died he left behind hundreds of paintings each over twelve feet long and a novel of approximately 15,000 typed pages that detailed the lives of the girls featured in his paintings--a body of work he never shared with anyone and which no one ever saw until they entered his one room rented apartment after his death. Suffice it to say, Henry Darger is now a very popular artist. You can't even get your hands on one of his paintings, let alone afford one! I've even heard that Hollywood has purchased the film rights to Darger's life, and that Leonardo di Caprio, god help us, has been considering playing the artist in the upcoming film! In this crude rush to cash in on the popularity of Darger, only one telling of his life comes anywhere close to the reality (and absurdity) that best characterizes this artist. John D'Agata's long fragmented essay "Collage History of Art" is not only the best story of this artist's life I've ever read, it's one the greatest art biographies I think that's ever been written about an American painter. The essay begins: "Pack: something with which to see." And with that we're off on what becomes a guided tour through both the fantastic, dangerous world of Darger's girls--complete with giant plants, winged dragons, and a moon called "Earth"!--as well as through Darger's own life and psyche. It's actually a tour through the history of art, except a history shortened and reimagined as originating with Darger! It's simply spectacular, and it's only one small part of this pretty amazing first book. Not only can D'Agata tell stories, but he makes all the research that obviously went into this book a painless, thrilling, exquisite kind of voyeurism into the hidden cultural and spiritual corners of American life and history. Buy it, stick with it, and thank me later!
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Summary: Joan Didion Meets Generation X!
Review: Charged with authentic, raw, and unpretentious curiosity, D'Agata's exhilirating book is always true and good, touching and inventive, heartbreakling and even hilarious. He's sort of a Joan Didion for Generation X, but smart and surprising and wonderful enough for the adult set too. His subjects are American, not just MTV oriented, and his tone and style is rambuctious but respectful of readers. D'Agata's great story, however, the thing that ties the book together, is the writing of the book itself; sort of the writing of the essay itself actually--a long lost form that could very well make a come back thanks to this charming treatment by a young man who seems to be resurrecting it all on his own. Along the way are divorcing parents, cattle castrations, and even an adorable climb up the peak of the Luxor Hotel in Vegas so that he can turn on what he calls the brightest light in the world.
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Summary: Up against the frontier
Review: My friend Lexy gave me a ratty looking advance copy of this book and said something like "I just heard this dude read in upstate New york and fell in love immediately," so I was intrigued. Halls of Fame is a beautiful strange mind. My friend called it "intoxicating;" I think that's right. I found myself sitting at Christmas dinner at home with my family and thinking about the poor pathetic lonely Flat Earth guy in the middle of the California desert in a falling apart trailer with the world curving around him, or about one of the other lonely souls in this book whose job it is to turn on "the brightest light in the world" at the top of a Las Vegas hotel even though the light isn't technically the brightest in the world anymore, or about the writer himself confessing to have been a sperm donor while he was a student in Cambridge because he was broke, and I didn't know whether to laugh at the book's absurdities or cry at them. It made my mind heavy. Because it can juggle its humor and seriousness simultaneously. This book is one that you will finish and then sit there and look at the ocean of its cover and think. You'll think about love and hope and myths and deaths and a computer game a little boy in the book plays that's automatically programmed to end every game the same way: it kills off everything in the world. You'll remember that America once hung off of a frontier. It's amazing.
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Summary: So the 21st century begins...
Review: ...ok, so that's a little over the top, but I'm so in awe of this book that my roommate just got me for x-mas, that I'm already reading for the second time. In a COMPLETELY new voice, D'agata presents a way of writing nonfiction that is so fresh it could be said we haven't seen the likes of it since Anne Carson first appeared in American journals--also seemingly out of nowehere like this John D'agata. He performs literary flips that make you wonder if he's even allowed to do what you're sitting there reading, and yet he pulls it off with grace and aplomb. Mesmerizering!
Rating:
Summary: a debut collection from the best essayist of generation x
Review: exhilirating, astounding, lyrical, learned, outrageous, angry, fun, true
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