Customer Reviews

American Romances: Essays

5 star:		(5)
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This book is a gem. A beautiful triangle of cake you can eat and keep. No, an energy bar for the mind studded with the world's best figs, plump and seedy and full of sexy nutriment. In short, if the USDA assigned values to literature, reading these words would be very, very good for you.

Read these pieces slowly. Savor them. The way the words and ideas are stacked is astonishing, making an absurd sense I didn't think a book liked to make. The logic here is indirect. Connections span galaxies, as in the first essay, which links Brian Wilson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lo and behold, the leaps work. They work very well.

The best books are, in the end, love stories. And despite-or because of-Rebecca Brown's battery-acid-in-the-liquid-cherry critique of American culture, this is really about the betrayal of love of country, a keening for the early death of America's dreams and best desires. It's a far-ranging book and you'll learn about Hawthorne, films, God, pop music, Gertrude Stein, saints--really, just about anything you might ever need to know--and enjoy it. It's a good read. Don't be scared off by the word essays. These are essays like you've never tasted them before.

I just assigned the essay, "Extreme Reading," from American Romances to my graduate writing students and--as I had hoped--it inspired so much vibrant thought and discussion. I am about to assign it again to a new batch of grad students in a week or so. I love this book, especially this essay, because it makes you think seriously about reading as you are reading. I think it should be put on some kind of compulsory reading list for the world. There are many brilliant moments in it, like:

Every time you read a book you read what you desire.

Every time you read a book you make that book your own.

This book is about many things--the book cover blurbs list the icons--Gertrude Stein, Brian Wilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and America. And all this is true; it is about all these things. But since she goes to lengths to point out that

Every time you read a book you read what you desire

Every time you read a book you make that book your own

then, this book, for me, is about the long search for faith. Reading is Brown's faith. Writing is her faith. Not the kind of faith that enters your life as a Divine--untouchable, unknowable, unheard--Presence. It is a faith that you take into your body from the outside--a Eucharist--something with texture, heart, and sound. This book presents reading as something magical, mystical, and relevant. It is the opposite of academic. It makes reading come alive. It makes the reader interactive. I highly recommend it.

I am grateful to the earlier Amazon reviewers of this collection of eight essays by Rebecca Brown. They were right that this work deserves five stars; my trust in them was fully validated.

I invite all prospective readers to read the first two essays in particular, "Hawthorne" and "A Child of Her Time." Both essays are touching to the point of tears and personal even though, for instance, "Hawthorne" is not about the author but about composer Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, born in Hawthorne, California, and 19th century author Nathaniel Hawthorne, "a beach boy too." The second essay, "A Child of Her Time," while being about the author, stays close to the ideas in "Hawthorne" while exploring the meaning of childhood. I enjoyed the second essay very much, I think, because, like the author, I, too, was a "Navy brat" (although the author never uses such a phrase), and lived out the consequences of such a lifestyle in my childhood.

The essay "Priests" is well-researched and thoughtfully provocative, especially for its emphasis on the gay meaning of "parfait" as a heretical but noble Albigensian answer to Roman Catholicism. I did not like, however, that the author conveyed the notion that Gertrude Stein was somehow the originator of another kind of parfait, the Oreo cookie. "Stein, for her part was not only the authoress of the modern version of the Albigensia Liturgy of the Supper, but also actually The Giver of the Name to the cookie that had remained heretofore . . . unnamed." Not true, not true. The author has taken advantage of a commercial mystery and instead inserted a false answer.

In "God without Words," readers learn that the musical composer Mendelssohn did not trust words whereas the author, as a writer, does -- and must, yet she allows that the mystery of growth and maturity is often wordless.

"Extreme Reading" offers up, among many ideas, the idea that you can take an inferior, piece-of-crap novel and edit it so that it reads like the novel you desire, a novel that mirrors your life. British playwright Joe Orton did just that -- with library books! -- and today his "defacements" of library books are now artistic treasures!

The sixth essay, "Invisible" makes a great read all by itself. Tracking the old movies about "The Invisible Man," "The Invisible Man Returns," and "The Invisible Woman," Rebecca Brown takes the phenomenon of being invisible as a metaphor for queerness not being recognized and works miracles with the lesbian as well as gay identities related to this metaphor -- through footnotes! The whole piece is a work of learning, fun, and intrigue.

The penultimate essay "My Western" is a return to the personal realm for the author as directly excavated in the second essay, and the reader clearly sees the consequences of being raised as a "Navy brat" -- without, I think, pity or sentimentality, though at times I did wonder whether the author was striving to jerk those tears out of the reader with lines, echoing the child actor Brandon de Wilde in the movie "Shane," like "Come back! Come back!"

The final essay, "Young Goodman Brown: A Gloss" returns to the theme of the first essay, "Hawthorne." An abstract art-piece, Rebecca Brown does, nonetheless, rest her case.

I thank the creative author for writing this delightful, thoughtful, entertaining collection as it was a delightful travel down the path of gay experience, both literary as well as personal.

Simultaneously deeply twisted and brilliantly incisive, Ms. Brown provides a cornucopia of intelligent essays filled with seemingly random references to pop culture (old western movies, the Beach Boys, old B movies, etc.), classic literature, and religion (reflections on her experiences on her school's fundamentalist "God Squad", and earlier experiences "playing priest" and dispensing Necco wafers), interspersed with (and somehow managing to relate to) her childhood of random vague memories while moving around with her mother and father, a career military man. I could definitely relate to her analogy of reading a book being similar to eating, as you take the "nourishment" you need and pass on the rest you don't need. And her comments about organized religion, in the context of looking at the Inquisition, are nothing short of brilliant. It all sounds very disjointed, but it is actually a very entertaining and enlightening read, although a bit short at 163 pages. May not be everyone's cup of cocoa, but I give it five unique stars out of five.