How Literature Saved My Life (18 page)

M
AYBE
A
NDER
M
ONSON
is that programmer. He is an entire generation younger than I am—the same age, approximately, as Ben Lerner. In the first chapter of Monson’s most recent book,
Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir
, his jury duty becomes the occasion for a pointillistic meditation on his own arrest for hacking/felony credit fraud, his confusion as to whether his mother died of colon cancer or ovarian cancer, the pros and cons of fact checking, the mediation of life by TV and film, the inability of the defendant to narrate his own story and (thus?) his guilt, the lure and blur of story, his—Monson’s—weariness with the hundred manuscripts he has to read as judge for a nonfiction prize (“I don’t object to the use of
I
[how could I?], but to its simple, unexamined use, particularly in nonfiction, where we don’t assume the
I
is a character, inherently unstable, self-serving, possibly unreliable”), the difference between
we
and
I
(one of the book’s main subjects), memory as a dream machine, composition as a fiction-making operation—in short, “What do we know, and how can we know we know it?”

Throughout the book, “daggers”—glyphs—adorn various words, redirecting me to images, video, and evolving text on the book’s website. Interstitial minichapters appear within and among chapters, providing the
work’s theoretical framework (“In others we ourselves are summed up”).

He visits the World’s Biggest Ball of Paint, which “continues to expand. Because of you. And you. Because of all of us.” This is as close as he is (I am) going to get to a direct articulation of his (my) aesthetic and metaphysic: he wants work to be equal to the chaos and contradiction of the cultural wiki to which we all have been assigned and the nothingness of death to which we are all destined. The deaths of Monson’s mother and D. F. Wallace haunt the text.

Monson posits and furnishes a “post-postmodern world” that is “starting to secede away from memoir, from the illusion of representation. Let’s make rules so we can follow them and then so we can break through them. By breaking through them we may start to feel alive again.” For Monson, for me, that’s the crux: he’s trying to make himself/make me feel something, feel anything, do whatever he can to vanquish the numbness that is a result of enforcing “order, decorum,” ceremony, formula, expectation.

I
T
’
S HARDLY
a coincidence that “Shipping Out,” Wallace’s most well-known essay, appeared only a month before
Infinite Jest
, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what’s so great about writing, said that we’re existentially alone on the planet—I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling—so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness. That answer seemed to me at the time, and still seems to me, beautiful, true, and sufficient.
A book should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us
. He then went on to add that oh, by the way, in fiction there’s all this contrivance of character, dialogue, and plot, but don’t worry: we can get past these devices. In the overwhelming majority of novels, though, including Wallace’s own, I find the game is simply not worth the candle. All the supposed legerdemain takes me away from the writer’s actual project. In their verbal energy, comic timing, emotional power, empathy, and intellectual precision, Wallace’s essays dwarf his stories and novels.

In “Shipping Out,” Wallace phrases himself as a big American baby with insatiable appetites and needs. This
may, of course, have been a part, even a large part, of Wallace’s actual personality (I was on a panel with him once and loved how rigorously he scrutinized everything I said, even if I was a little alarmed at the volume of tobacco juice he spat into a coffee can at his feet), but Wallace’s strategy is an example of what Adorno calls immanence: a particular artistic or philosophic relation to society. Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture, to reflect back its “whatness,” refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness. Inevitably, this leads our narrator to sound somewhat abject or debased, given how abject or debased the culture is likely to be at any given point. On the cruise ship
Zenith
, which Wallace rechristens the
Nadir
, he catches himself thinking he can tell which passengers are Jewish. A very young girl beats him badly at chess. He’s a terrible skeet shooter. Mr. Tennis, he gets thumped in Ping-Pong. Walking upstairs, he studies the mirror above so he can check out the ass of a woman walking downstairs. He allows himself to be the sinkhole of bottomless American lack. In order to lash us to his own sickness-induced metaphors, he writes in as demotic an American idiom as possible: “like” as a filler, “w/r/t.” He’s unable to find out the name of the corporation that many of his fellow passengers work for. He keeps forgetting what floor the dance party is on. He can’t figure out what a nautical knot is. He’s unable to tolerate that the ship’s canteen carries Dr. Pepper but not Mr. Pibb.

Drafting off Frank Conroy’s “essaymercial” for the cruise line—“the lapis lazuli dome of the sky”—in much the same way Spalding Gray in
Swimming to Cambodia
uses the pietistic
The Killing Fields
and James Agee in
Let Us Now Praise
continually works against the contours of his original assignment for
Forbes
, Wallace is nobody’s idea of a reliable reporter: never not epistemologically lost, psychologically needy, humanly flawed. (When a client complained that the roof was leaking, Frank Lloyd Wright replied, “That’s how you know it’s a roof.”) The
Nadir
promises to satiate insatiable hungers and thereby erase dread by removing passengers’ consciousness that they’re mortal. Ain’t gonna happen: Wallace can hardly say a thing without qualifying it, without quibbling about it, without contradicting it, without wondering if it’s actually wrong, without feeling guilty about it. “Shipping Out” is about Wallace’s flirtation with the consciousness obliteration plan; the footnotes, finally, are the essence of the essay, making as they do an unassailable case for the redemptive grace of consciousness itself.

O
NE OF MY
clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a
sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading
The Catcher in the Rye
for the first time. As have so many other unpopular, oversensitive American teenagers over the last sixty years, I memorized the crucial passages of the novel and carried it around with me wherever I went. The following year, my sister said that
Catcher
was good, very good in its own way, but that it was really time to move on now to
Nine Stories
, so I did. My identification with Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was extreme enough that my mother scheduled a few sessions for me with a psychologist friend of hers, and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” remains one of my favorite stories. In college, I judged every potential girlfriend according to how well she measured up to Franny in
Franny and Zooey
. In graduate school, under the influence of
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters
and
Seymour: An Introduction
, I got so comma-, italics-, and parenthesis-happy one semester that my pages bore less resemblance to prose fiction than to a sort of newfangled Morse code.

When I can’t sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves. There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them. I’ve read each of his books at least a dozen times. What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00
A.M
. of the soul? For me, it’s how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon
what it hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of his work—what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable—lies in its revelation that this isn’t a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think.

W
E LIVE IN
a culture that is completely mediated and artificial, rendering us (me, anyway; you, too?) exceedingly distracted, bored, and numb. Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat. Why is the traditional novel c. 2013 no longer germane (and the postmodern novel shroud upon shroud)? Most novels’ glacial pace isn’t remotely congruent with the speed of our lives and our consciousness of these lives. Most novels’ explorations of human behavior still owe far more to Freudian psychology than they do to cognitive science and DNA. Most novels treat setting as if where people now live matters as much to us as it did to Balzac. Most novels frame their key moments as a series of filmable moments straight out of Hitchcock. And above all, the tidy coherence of most novels—highly praised ones in particular—implies a belief in an orchestrating
deity, or at least a purposeful meaning to existence that the author is unlikely to possess, and belies the chaos and entropy that surround and inhabit and overwhelm us. I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it. Acutely aware of our mortal condition, I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it).

T
HE SADNESS OF
the Yankee fan lies in his knowledge that his gorgeous dream is made of money.

This is America, though: capital of capitalism.

I was once wildly in lust with a girl who was fond of saying it’s not the bulge in front, it’s the bulge in back.

So, too, I’ve lived my life for art, which I know is not immemorial.

Illusion, baby, illusion—whatever the cost.

I
N THE EXTREMELY
bureaucratized culture in which I now live, I’m inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, lectures, permit forms, advertisements, primers, catalogues, comment cards, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, alumni magazine class notes. What I call “fraudulent artifacts”—pseudo-interviews, faux lectures, quasi-letters, “found” texts, etc.—exact/enact giddy, witty, imaginative revenge on the received forms that dominate and define our lives. These counterfeits capture the barely suppressed frustration and feeling and yearning that percolate about 1/16th of an inch below most official documents. Such forgeries appeal to me—utterly disconnected as I am from the conventions of traditional fiction and having turned to genre-emptying work to reanimate my literary passion.

E.g., Gregory Burnham’s “Subtotals,” seemingly a pointless data sheet of the number of times the narrator has climbed stairs, sent a postcard, received a kiss, etc. It isn’t that at all. It’s a beautiful ode to—if we’re lucky—not finding God or winning a Purple Heart but averting calamity and muddling through in the middle. This is what I do, in any case, so I want to say we all are.

Lucas Cooper, “Class Notes,” on one level a
McSweeney’s-
style parody of alumni magazine class notes, on another level an anthropology of Reagan-era unfettered capitalism,
and on still a deeper level a chart of the transition over the course of a man’s life from hyperaggression to inevitable loss to the bliss of some big quiet thing falling down and locking into place, like a whisper of some weight.

Paul Theroux, “Acknowledgments,” a parody of the acknowledgments in the front of a scholarly book and a brutal commentary on the vampiric nature of the well-funded critic (getting fat on the bones of the obscure poet).

Rick Moody, “Primary Sources,” ostensibly a list of Moody’s favorite works of art while growing up but really a devastating meditation on how, in the absence of his father, he was “looking elsewhere for the secrets of ethics and home.” Join the fucking club, my friend.

C
HRISTIAN
M
ARCLAY
’
S
The Clock
is a twenty-four-hour-long video constructed of thousands of film fragments in which a character interacts in some way with a clock or watch. As each new clip appears, a new narrative is suggested, only to be swiftly overtaken by another one. The video is synchronized to the local time. At any moment, I can look at the work and use it as a clock. There are amazingly few kinds of gestures
available in the repertory of human behavior, and yet there’s a comfort that at, say, 5:00
P.M.
, for most people it’s quitting time. Film (life itself?) is an irreducibly melodramatic medium. Very, very few clips from comedies—would wreck the mood, which is
Our birth is our death begun
. Many of the actors are now dead. Soon enough I’ll join them (you, too, dear reader …). The seconds are ticking away as I’m watching. I want to ID the clip—
I exist
—but the fragment and my identification are almost immediately overwhelmed by time, which always wins.