Customer Reviews

Halls of Fame: Essays

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The silly label next to John D'Agata's name on the cover is dead wrong. There's not a lick of "essay" in here!

But you'll be relieved to read in his biography that this extremely young author was trained as a poet at the Iowa Writers Workshop, because no average writer of "creative nonfiction" could manage what D'Agata does with subjects that range from a story about the brightest light in the world to a sperm bank (where he apparently worked as a donor) to a luscious history of how lists of the wonders of the world are made. His appetite for "stuff" seems unquenchable, and his love of language is obvious.

Really this is a 250 page book of poetry. Read it and you'll change your mind about that old fart genre called the essay. Read it aloud and you'll set the next few days of your life to music!

You'll spend some time scratching your head as you read this book, wondering whether it's nonfiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, fantasy or some amalgam of them all.

Then, at about half way through, you'll stop caring, because at this point you'll have reached the book's title section, "Hall of Fame: An Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter," a not entirely unironic meditation on the 3000 some-odd halls of fame in the United States which acts as both investigative journalism into some particular places the author has visited (there's a hall of fame of "Suffleboard" and a "Burlesque" hall of fame, for example) and personal meditation on the author's own family discord that is never quite clearly expressed but instead lingers overhead making all of these journeys into the halls of fame of America a very desperate, lonely, heartbreaking act.

I have no idea if these "halls" are poems (they look like poetry at least) nor what in the book is real and what imagined (there's an interview with the so-called president of the Flat Earth Society, for example) but I think the ambiguity of the book's forms is intentional, and meant to mask--or maybe even illustrate--an uncertainty in the world that this very mournful but simultaneously witty author feels deep in his bones. This is a tremendous book that is going to change the way essays are made from now on.

Or, if these in fact aren't "essays," it will at least change something in American literature.

Warning: This book is not an easy read!

But then again groundbreaking literature never has been...

This is not for those who think that the personal essay is the only kind of essay there is or who think The Liars Club is an exemplar of great nonfiction or that last year's outrageously hyped Dave Eggers is what an experimental nonfiction writer might look like.

This is for those readers who want to be challenged on every level of the reading, whether about the subjects the book treats or the styles it employs or the huge disarming issues it raises about the very nature of genre.

In general, for anyone who wants a glimpse at what essayists a decade from now will be writing, you must definitely read this amazing first book!

And if you get a chance to hear him in person read from this do it! I just heard this dude perform at my friend's school in Massacusetts and it was completely transportaive!

Read it!

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!

...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!

d'agata's first book is a bona fide masterpiece of nonfiction. pure and simple, 'halls' is a weave of the mythology of america, the oddest vines of human nature, and the poetry in mundane and great earths alike. i thought his 'martha graham' piece, which utilizes architecturally the same basic scattered-card-like narrative used throughout this book, was brilliant when i first read it years ago, but the book's centerpiece, 'an essay about the ways in which we matter', adds mind-blowing to that.

What the essay can do is this: "Halls of Fame"--a book that I think changes everything in the field that people call "nonfiction." Forget about melodramatic memoirs with fancy sequined blinders on or investigative journalism that's as formulaic as the New Yorker's past 500 issues or critical expositons on mundane intellectual trinkets, "Halls of Fame" by John D'Agata is as "fact" driven as all of those forms but as entertaining as a circus. (A bad analogy, but there in fact truly is something circus-like about the subjects D'Agata pursues and his attempts to combine them oddly, juxtaposing at times the absolutely absurd with the wonderfully sublime.) I've been waiting for a writer to turn our attention back to the disciplined sensibility of the classic American essay; this guy does it by taking tradition of the essay and spinning it anew for the 21st century. If you love nonfiction and want to know where it's likely to be heading, I recommend this book more strongly than anything else out in this genre at the moment.

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.

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.

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.