Customer Reviews

Sick of Nature

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At first glance, Gessner's newest volume appears to be a random collection of 17 very different essays. The assorted ruminations cover the genre of nature writing, overdevelopment of Cape Cod beaches, Ultimate Frisbee games and teams, the writing life, urban vs. rural life, family relationships, and a side trip to the jungle of Belize, all capped off with a coyote trilogy. But as the reader progresses from one selection to another, a unified theme becomes clear. This book is an exploration of all aspects of wildness -- in the author, in other humans, in animals, in habitats. Gessner poses the fundamental questions and struggles to provide reasonable answers. What is wildness? Where is it? Is it fair to study wild animals via an electronic scientific method? And is a wild turkey still wild if it struts along the back alleys of Boston?

Devout animal lovers, be warned: David Gessner puts realism into his nature writing and glosses over neither death nor decay. If you prefer your nature Disney-fied, rent a movie. Not to be missed in this book: the imaginary Nature Writers party on pages 4 and 5, and what might happen if Edward Abbey slipped alcohol into Thoreau's water glass.

These are thought-provoking essays that are recommended reading for nature lovers, nature writers, and memoir fans. At the very least, you'll start studying shadows for coyote shapes.

A brilliant and funny examination of the literary, natural, and human world. Gessner's characters -- himself, especially -- are engaging, flawed and universal. His descriptions are unbeatable. His love of flora, fauna, and Cape Cod are palpable even through his most ironic musings.

A book that defies category, there's something in it for everyone. If you like to take walks on the beach, if you love your family, if you ever aspired to create art yourself. And most especially if you like to read, you'll love Sick of Nature.

Bravo to David Gessner for thumbing his nose at the hallowed genre of nature writing! I love the genre, and I believe Gessner does too. Still, I applaud anyone who helps to tip over sacred cows. Gessner expands the possibilities for other nature writers and loosens things up. He structures his book of essays around the tale of a prodigal nature writer. First he rebels against his self-assigned role as wise and straight-laced chronicler of plovers and other small beer (Return of the Osprey, A Wild, Rank Place). Then he strikes out into the territory of the personal essay to explore his relationships and his writing apprenticeship. Finally, he returns to nature writing, reinvigorated and willing to break the rules.

The book opens with a rant so clever, funny, and hyperactive that it dazzled me. I tried in vain to summarize what his complaint against nature writing was. I had to go back over the argument sentence by sentence to catch every insight. Gessner chafes against a sense of restraint, a standard of quiet gentility and decorum.Gessner rolls his eyes at what he sees as a habit of humorless, excessive earnestness. He complains about the narrowness of the genre and its tendency toward repetition. Then he admits that it is his own conformity that embarrasses and frustrates him more than anyone else's expectations.

Gessner is sick not just of nature writing, but of the marginal position of nature writers in society, of the skeptical inquiries about his job, of his own "eccentric costume of an English bird watcher." He worries, too, about the self-indulgence of the lonely philosopher on the shore. Perhaps most of all, Gessner hates the writer's helplessness. He groans at the contrast between his lofty aspirations and his inability to stop the destruction of the wilderness. He throws up his hands: "I have to admit that an essay is a much less effective method of protecting the land than a cudgel. In other words, I have to admit to impotence."

By the end of the introductory essay, though, he's back on his feet, trumpeting a new aesthetic. He makes a plea for wildness and honesty in nature writing, "for freedom. For sloppiness... for amateurism, variety, danger, spontaneity." By this time we can infer both directly and indirectly what figure he'd like to cut. The persona that attracts him is virile, wild, funny, sexy, irreverent, contrarian, a little cranky. He's got a touch of Edward Abbey's picaresque approach to our lovely earth. Gessner wants a nature writing that excludes no human truth, a nature writing that can include substitute teaching, TV and Al Qaeda if these affect our relations with nature. While Gessner may not be quite such a colorful lecher and prankster and messiah as Edward Abbey, he's more credible in the maturity department. Gessner is so self-reflective that we're not always sure whether he's commenting on nature writing or describing his personal trajectory. Fortunately, he makes both these projects revealing and appealing.

In "A Polygamist of Place," Gessner describes his alternate attachments to Cape Cod and Colorado. He points out that marriage to a place remains the dominant, unquestioned trope for American nature writing. Why should marriage be necessary? He sees its value, but it may not be for everyone. Gessner notes the virtues of distance; when we step away from a beloved place we can sometimes see it more clearly in the light of contrast and nostalgia.

Gessner feels a certain urgency about exploring his own defects. He complains that nature writing is "a strange Sunday School where I alternate between sitting in the pews (reading nature) and standing at the pulpit (writing nature)." In this book he refuses those pieties. He won't just preach and worship; he'll confess to the sins that give all humans vitality.

In the title essay, Gessner claims, "I'm willing to write manifestos, but I'd prefer having others act them out." I don't buy this. His final trilogy of essays, "Howling with the Trickster: A Wild Memoir," does act out his manifesto. In these essays, he moves to Boston, gets obsessed with urban coyotes, tracks one alone a concrete canal, supports his mentally ill brother, and watches his wife's belly swell as his own daughter grows. Gessner waxes earnest, emotional, inquisitive, lyrical, playful by turns. He braids together personal history, natural history, and philosophizing. When he sobbed at his daughter's birth, I started crying too.

Ultimately, it's liveliness that matters most to Gessner. Like Whitman, he looks for energy wherever it lurks. It lurks in the coyote by the trash heap as well as in the sublime irridescent "blue-grey juniper berries." In his deepest essays, his warmth and all-too-human honesty transport us. He seeks truth and an impish liberation in the profane; in the process he finds his way to the holy once again.

Gessner is a master at piling up the self-deprecating humor until he arrives at a serious and thoughtful point. His argument with the prettified school of nature writing is well-taken, but his ruminations on the writing life are on target as well. Aspiring writers will find humor and comfort in his accounts of writerly envy, the frustrations of one's apprentice period, or his time as a bookstore clerk.

Gessner returns to the right blend of personal and nature that made his earlier works a sure sign of a budding artiste. While he may occasionally turn a phrase simply for the pleasure of seeing it in print, his writing is generally a non-stop stream of spot on insight that allows the reader to catch a ride on his journey of discovery.

If narrative nonfiction does not interest you, then you can stop reading this and go back to reading Water For Elephants or some such.

If you do, like I do, love reading high-quality, well-crafted narrative nonfiction, then you will love this book. Gessner is nominally a nature writer, but he really covers a lot of bases, which makes him hard to categorize but exceptionally fun to read.

As mentioned in previous reviews, this is a collection of essays and nonfiction, and is definitely not your stodgy, self-important nature writing. I had previously read one of the essays included here, "Bigger Than Shakespeare" which is a funny, entertaining tale of Gessner meeting fellow author Sebastian Junger. My other favorites are "Dungo in the Jungle" (about a trip to Belize), "To the Fatherland" (about his father and a trip they took together to Germany), and of course the title essay. In all the essays, he touches on personal history, nature, symbolism, sociology, politics, all with a touch of humor and a gifted eye for detail.

I am currently finishing the last part of the book, a triptych of essays regarding coyotes in Boston, and I can't put it down.