Make Gibbons Laugh #43
The Triannual Book Review!
A loving shout-out, as always, to the Santa Monica Public Library and my good pal, Gilma, in the parking lot. My faves this trimester (and as always, does “Triannual” mean three times a year or once every three years? Yes.):
The Golden Season by Madeline Kay Sneed. I used to drink cheap adult sodas with the author at the Tam on Tremont Street, but even if that weren’t the case I’d still rave about The Golden Season. When I gushed about this book in January, I framed it around its movie and TV relatives (the smoothie you get when you throw Friday Night Lights, Lady Bird, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire into the blender). This time, I wanted to include its literary immediate family: Steinbeck’s narrative expansiveness, distinct sense of place, and punchy, forceful sentences that get to the verb and waste no time; Marilynne Robinson’s grounded spirituality, tenderness, and familial center; and Carmen Maria Machado’s incisive wisdom on grief, queerness, and identity. Joan Didion is to California as Lauren Groff is to Florida as Madeline Sneed is to Texas.
The Reenactments by Nick Flynn. In the wrong hands, four memoirs by the same writer might seem…redundant? Navel-gazing? Inefficient storytelling? But a Nick Flynn memoir is a genre unto itself: yes, books that are ostensibly about his life—mom setting their house on fire for the insurance money when he’s five, dad leaving when he’s zero only to appear at the homeless shelter where Flynn works 25 years later, the surreality of watching that life reenacted on screen by Julianne Moore and Robert De Niro (and a reminder of Tom Grimes’ line: “Readers are not moved by incidents alone; they are moved by the meaning of the incidents that have changed the way you understand your life.”).
But really, his books are a high-wire act of nonfiction storytelling that happen to (mostly) be told in the first person, “a mesmerizingly sharp-edged and kaleidoscopic literary tour de force as well a compelling argument about consciousness, representation, and grief,” to quote the back cover. Through this kaleidoscopic form, he’s not writing with resolution but, slowly and gracefully, towards clarity, working it out on the page, which is always infinitely more compelling (The way he moves between short vignettes, from the most macro philosophy and art theory to the most micro lived details, reminds me a lot of Maggie Nelson’s work if you’re a fan!).
And like with Yonder last time, it’s my favorite sub-genre, the poet writing book-length prose: the syntactical efficiency and cleanliness, the deliberate pacing, the occasional flourish, the way they take stale language and stale ideas and give them face-lifts (This Is The Night Our House Will Catch Fire is my favorite. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is his first, most famous, and probably the best place to start. The Ticking Is The Bomb takes longer to reach cruising altitudes but is, of course, also great.)
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett. I’ve been playing a lot more hoops these days and watching old highlights. And while reading this, I kept thinking, “this is a NICHE comparison, yes, but Ann Patchett might be the Kevin McHale of modern writers”: not flashy but so fundamentally sound, reliable, and steadily prolific. It’s an essay collection that’s as unfussy and unshowy as it is profoundly moving.
Pieces about her “three dads” and substance abuse will break you open and make you hold people a little tighter. Other pieces will make you stand up a little straighter and more assuredly. No living writer *gets* dogs or bookstores—and the communal joys in running bookstores— better, more intimately, or more infectiously. But at its center is the title piece about Tom Hanks’ personal assistant, of all people, with whom Patchett unexpectedly becomes dear friends, Covid roommates, and for whom Patchett becomes an almost guardian during her chemo—during the first three months of Covid. It’s 20,000 words (!!). I read it twice in a row. It’s a stunner (and a golden example of how to write big things small.)
A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib. In the words of Real Life School Of Rock Music Instructor and Friend Of The Newsletter, Cody, “Hanif’s work has become one of the most common talking points and sources of connection among my artistic pals” (mainly over his stunning first book of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Til They Kill Us). It’s a sentiment I love: connecting over a writer, connecting over that writer, a critic who writes about art—across all media—with such a rare blend of joy, attention, generosity, and precision. And it’s a writer I love, who seamlessly merges art criticism with personal essay, poetry with prose, the cultural with the personal. The book is largely about Black performance, exploring everything from Soul Train and Aretha Franklin to Wu-Tang and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but he weaves his own life in and around and among, moving from the first person to the close third to the more distant third and back, shifting on a dime from the lyrical to the analytical. He’s a true unicorn in talent and execution—and in providing connection!
Maybe my favorite three pages I read during the entire second trimester: a vignette he writes seemingly about Whitney Houston’s performance at the 1988 Grammys. Really, though, he’s writing about forgiveness, catharsis through dance, “the certain and uncertain movement of limbs,” wearing multiple outfits on stage (“like the butterfly, who first crawls listlessly along the landscape before spinning itself a bed…what a mercy it must be to be able to sleep oneself into both beauty and flight”), and “not needing to carry beauty around, at least not on my own person. I want, instead, to fill my hands with whatever beauty I can steal from all of your best moments. All of the things we might watch together in shared love.”
Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz. The inaugural Jameson Toole-Recommended Book that 1. defies genre and description (Solnit-y memoir but more of a narrative, I’d say),
2. delights on a sentence level, and
3. it only feels right to just quote the most appropriately-hyperbolic blurb:
“An unfolding astonishment to read.”—Alison Bechdel
The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. The main plot points in the Will Becomes A Massive Mary Karr Fan story:
1. In 2015, I listened to and watched her famous commencement speech (and read and re-read the transcript), reminding Syracuse graduates, “don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people’s blow-dried outsides.”
2. In 2016, I listened to her episode of On Being with Krista Tippett, called “Astonished by the Human Comedy,” where she reminded listeners that “a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it,” among all sorts of Marry Karr gems.
3. In 2017, I read Lit, her most recent memoir, and The Art of Memoir, her book on craft—the former as poetic and literary as any memoir, the latter maybe the most brilliant book on craft this century.
4. In 2018, she did a reading and book signing at Emerson for her new book of poems, Tropic of Squalor. I nervously brought my copy of Lit to her table. I was wearing a sweatshirt that said HARRY (as in Styles). She asked if that was my name, if she should make out the inscription to Harry. I bumblingly told her, “no, uh, uh, ahhhhh, ehYEAHwelluhWill-uh…Will…yeah the uh Will. Is. Actually Will hahah.”
She very graciously and patiently took in my bumbling. ““Will! That’s always been my favorite name!”
I’m sure I was sweating and mumbling incoherently. “And I’m… just uhhh Will…not a, you know, the William. Harry’s ahhhh… the uh for the uh Harry Styles…”
“Oh, I know him!”
I pulled down my sweatshirt sleeve to show Harry Styles’ unofficial slogan.
“Oh isn’t that wonderful? Treat People With Kindness. Always. Always. I love that. Here you go, sweetie.”
Which is all to say, “before you came into my life, I missed you so bad,” to quote our former poet laureate, Carly Rae Jepsen.
And that’s all BEFORE I even read her most critically-acclaimed book. This! The Liars’ Club (from 1995)! In 2019, The New York Times ranked the 50 greatest memoirs of the last 50 years. This was NUMBER FOUR. Breathless. Funny. Apocalyptic. Gritty. Witty. Sweeping. Brutal. Intimate. Incandescent material, hot and bright and vivid, specific and harrowing. Incandescent sentences, a poet at heart with a lyrical East Texas Twang. (Think This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff if it were plugged into an electric outlet, an inch from a bathtub with the tub itself full of bourbon, vodka, and jellyfish from the Gulf of Mexico.)
This is very Inside Baseball and will sound so pretentious, but in memoir there are nine modes of first-person narration that make memoir much more novel-like than most nonfiction (eg. reminiscent I, self-regarding I, engaged I, reconstructed I, etc.). If there’s a memoirist who integrates all nine more compellingly than this…I’d love to read them!). Stay lit. Take no guff, folks:
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez. In Bull Durham’s most famous scene, Kevin Costner launches into the most famous not-really-about-baseball baseball movie monologue: “I believe in the soul, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap.” He includes some other raunchy things he also believes in that I’ve omitted here, but I’ve always (secretly) identified with the Sontag part. A writer whose work I NEVER find self-indulgent, overrated, or crap: Sigrid Nunez, who’s emerged in the last three years as one of my favorite prose stylists—she’s like Joan Didion’s more outgoing, funnier younger sister.
I like to imagine that even Costner’s character, Crash Davis (what a baseball name! Another impeccable Davis baseball name: Chili Davis.) would enjoy Sempre Susan—getting a tour of Sontag’s (self-indulgent, very curmudgeonly) self but from a good friend’s perspective, seven years after Sontag died and 45 years after they met.
The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski. My favorite contemporary sports writer ranking the 100 greatest baseball players ever? Less of a sports book, pe se, than a series of moving essays that happen to be centered around baseball players (and his mom’s role shaping him as a young fan!)? The perfect blend of baseball romance and Moneyball stats? The rare anthology that actually includes and celebrates the Negro Leagues in its rankings?! The rare sportswriter who’s funny and can actually write a sentence?! Yeah, I hated it (all 830 pages).
The pieces that most moved me: Ernie Banks (the joy!), Satchel Paige (the resilience and almost mythical improbability of making it to the big leagues, at that time, at his age—late 40s!), Hank Aaron (why he’s actually quite underrated, why the home runs are—incredibly—the fourth or five most superlative thing on his resume!) Frank Robinson (the persistence! The presence in Posnanski’s childhood!), Stan Musial (the kindness!), Clayton Kershaw (a surprisingly romantic take on a fairly cold dude! A lovely connection with Koufax!), and—you might need to sit down for this—Derek Jeter. I don’t *enjoy* the Yankees. Or their fans. Chanting “27!” as a defense mechanism is the “BUT HER EMAILS” of thoughtful sports dialogue, not to mention the majority of those 27 happened before people of color were playing, when there were all of eight teams in the league with no playoffs before the World Series, with no salary cap to limit the Yankees’ lavish spending, before we landed on the moon, so it’s a really relevant number today, in 2022, that doesn’t at all sound pathetic, or tone-deaf, or clinging to the past, The Great Past—remind you of a certain red-hatted political campaign?—when the Yankees haven’t won since Obama’s first year in office and have an entire roster geared towards hitting 301-foot home runs over their Little League right field fence. And yet, and yet, and yet, leave it to Joe Pos to do the unthinkable: removing the insufferable pinstripes from the conversation and examining Jeter’s career as a touching piece on presence and routine.
Bananas For You by Sabrina Moyle. This 24-page romp has it all, folks. Where else can you find chickens, tubas, tigers, bananas, the solar system, hot dogs, jokes about underwear, and fart innuendos, all accompanied and enlivened by the brightest, most joyful illustrations (a sister/sister author/illustrating team!)? On every page, amidst the sillies, you’re reminded that you are loved, a “side-splitting book about how a-peeling you are”— punchlines that pack a deceptive punch! (Approved by 15-month-old nieces and 31-year-old toddlers.)
P.S. The great Mike Judge recently waxed philosophical in The New Yorker about why getting hit in the balls is such a fundamentally funny human experience. How am I JUST seeing this Beans-Town Bludgeon, now, five years later?
When a doctor taps your knee, your leg involuntarily kicks out. When a ceremonial first pitch hits an unsuspecting photographer in the NARDS, my head tilts back. And I cackle.
Of course, the entire 1967 Red Sox team is standing RIGHT behind him. Of course, the PA announcer tells him to “fire it in there”—which feels like a Christopher Guest-ian comedic set-up with the versatility of “there.” Of course, you can hear the audible THUMP when ball meets nards because, of course, the thumpee is closest to the mic. Of course, Mascot Reactions are a special genre of comedy, and, of course, Wally The Green Monster, not known for subtle performances, reacts apoplectically. Of course, the thumpee rolls out of frame altogether. Of course, the organist plays those same notes after every first pitch at every game, but here the timing of the music just feels—you know, I have NO notes!