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Summary: New Millennium
Review: It's how I've started mine. D'Agata's got the wit and good sense to simultaneously laugh and cry *at* and *with* his subjects. It makes the tone of his *essays* real, truly felt. That term essay however has got to go. I think the nonfiction crowd is probably flattering itself by thinking this book has got anything to do with them. It's a poetic sensibility trough and through. Truly it's a new use of genre. Simply startling.
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Summary: Praise and Thanks
Review: To use the words of my professor: Less a collection of essays than a love song to the whole genre. Thank You.
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Summary: The Heart Must Surely Break Before It Can Begin to Feel
Review: Now officially my favorite book of 2001. What mostly has gotten attention on here are the easy essays, which is predictable for amazon.com. But there's so much more beneath the surface of those few reader-friendly parts. It's basically a collection of poetry, but I understand why it's masked as nonfiction. He's testing the limits of the form unlike anyone else in the genre. He's to Dave Eggers what Paul Thomas Anderson is to Kevin Smith in film. Art versus commerce, simply put. If you tend to choose art in your life over the latest popular sensations you'll love this book.
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Summary: A Shining Laramie Wonder All His Own
Review: The biggest thrill in my short academic career so far has been getting to know this writer of huge intelligence and passion and sensitivity over the past few months. HALLS OF FAME engages and challenges and explodes and swoons, making the self-help memoir set seem so superfluous to the world of literature that it's almost embarassing. He's a keeper, as my colleague said after the young wonderkid read here a few months ago. And a marvel.
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Summary: Guy davenport Devotee = D'Agata Devotee
Review: He said it best in Harper's Magazine, August 2001: "D'Agata ia an alchemist who spins trash into purest gold.... The kind of "experimental" writer who defies all we know and dread about experimental writing: he is readable."
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Summary: Hall of Fame of You
Review: You are the first nonfiction writer I've read who has spoken to me. If you read this John Dagata, please know that what you have created here has inspired and moved me more than any other book of nonfiction I've ever been exposed to. I can't wait for your next book. I've recommended it to everyone I know!
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Summary: Dazzling
Review: Manages to make the sad sorriness of his subjects (lonely flat earth presidents, doomed experimental colleges, Martha Graham a bus trip to Hoover dam that never actually arrives) as interesting and suggestive as the Halls of Fame that win his dazzling attention. This is a voluptiously intelligent and felt book that will be a challenge for anyone who *expects* certain things from "nonfiction".
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Summary: Wicked Better Than the Other Guy
Review: I don't want to sound mean, but this guy could right that Dave Eggers guy under the table. I was therefore wicked glad to hear him say he doesn't like the other guy's book (well he was more polite) because it seems to me that THIS is the future of nonfiction, not memoir. he's pushing the envelope, he's breaking down barriers, he's mergeing genres--whatever cliche you want to use will work. The writer does it all. The book will surprise you.
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Summary: My Favorite 2001 Book
Review: One needs to decide what to do with literature like this. Where to put it? What influences to attribute to it? How even to read it?I came across John D'Agata's HALLS OF FAME sort of out of anger. I had just read last winter Dave Egger's odd phenomenon of a book and was in constant arguments with my friends about it. Generally, I thought the book bit the big one; they loved it. I wondered whether we really were going to accept this as experimental writing in nonfiction. They said they loved it because it made them laught. I wanted more. I heard a friend online talking about a reading she'd gone to by this nobody John D'Agata dude and that he gave what she considered the single best reading she'd ever heard. A pretty spectacular review I thought. I asked what he wrote; she said essays. I said Essays?! He gave a good reading of essays?! What I discovered once I picked up the book is that these things the author calls essays are really not. They're poems. They're meditations on subjects, fully researched exploration sof wacky and sad and obscure and heartbreaking subjects. They are like journalism, but they're also kind of personal. They're like criticism, but also lovingly sappy. They're like poems in their musical, lush use of language, and yet they offer a smarter voice, a keener intelligence on every page than perhaps most essays you'll read. my favorites: Round Trip, an essay about a bus trip to Hoover Dam that never actually manages to reach Hoover Dam (he write about everything else); Notes Toward the Making of a Whole Human Being, a five page long sentence about a weird college the writer attended that doubles as a cattle ranch; and And There Was Evening and There Was Morning, a long, breathlessly funny and touching examination of the brightest light in the world (which is in Las Vegas) and the oldest sleep clinic in America (also Vegas) which evolves into a meditation about light and dark, life and death. Pretty spectacularly brilliant. In short I thought the book was maybe the best I've read in years, partly because it challeneged me and kept me on my toes, and partly because it spoke right to me. Funny how great literature can do more than one thing.
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Summary: I sat down to write my first review...
Review: ...and lo! to my amazement it's already been done. No proble, I thought. I have something unique anyway to say about this book. So I started. I'd been talking about the book with my son for the past few weeks; he's the one who first told me about through a acourse at school. And so when I told him that I thought I would try to write a review for it on Amazon.com he first said, MOM, that's for dorks! But I persisted, and won, and so I began. but then a couple hours later in walks my son again with a clipping from the newspaper. MOM, he says, really I think it's been done before! He hands me a column from the New York Times Sunday Book Review in which the author lists this young D'Agata wonder among the likes of Mandelstam and Powell as a writer worth reading especially in light of the troubled past weeks in America. A writer who's serious, so rare for his generation. "Real art matters now," the colum author says, and then goes on to tell us why this book in particular is so wonderfully precious. That's my review.
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