Review by New York Times Review
OVER the last 25 years, the memoir - or The Story of My Life, as Vivian Gornick calls it - has become one of the major gestures of American writing. In direct opposition to the literalminded, linear and epistemologically naïve nature of many such works, there has emerged in the last dozen years a vital countertradition, what John D'Agata labels the "lyric essay." It's a form with ancient roots. Heraclitus, anyone? In D'Agata's words, "what the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay what it takes is a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. . . . Lyric essays seek answers, yet seldom seem to find them." This is an exact and useful description of the work now being done by, among many others, Ander Monson, who in "Vanishing Point" performs the same crucial inversion his fellow travelers do: he turns the banality of nonfiction inside out and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area to investigate claims of fact and truth, an extremely rich theater for exploring the most serious ontological questions. "The unreality, the misrememberings, the act of telling in starts and stops," Monson writes, "the pockmarked surface of the I: that's where all the good stuff is, the fair and foul, that which is rent, that which is whole, that which engages the whole reader. Let us linger there, not rush past it." In this collection, Monson proves to be a marvel of not rushing past it. In one essay, Monson's jury duty becomes the occasion for a pointillistic meditation on his own adolescent conviction for felony credit fraud, his confusion as to whether his mother died of colon cancer or ovarian cancer, the pros and cons of factchecking, the mediation of life by TV and film, the inability of the defendant to narrate his own story (thus sealing his guilt), the lure and blur of story. Monson also discusses his weariness with the hundredplus 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." This leads him to reflect on the fading difference between we and I on memory as a dream machine, on composition as a fiction-making operation. In short, "What do we know, and how can we know we know it?" Elsewhere in the book, Monson acknowledges his long-held desire to vanish and his predilection for "periodic alcoholic obliteration." Found texts proliferate: a photo of an infant, a Post-it that says "Wiped 2/4/08," some hilariously undergraduate marginalia on "To the Lighthouse," Monson's own youthful and self-serious outline for a cyberpunk novel (which he eviscerates), a psychological (self-?)assessment of someone named Mrs. Jenetta Woodward, a page ripped from a notebook, a list of young women who have vanished. "The essay perishes. It perforates, is perforated by bullet holes. As the body perishes so does the essay, which is like a body. . . . And what of you, you who are already forgetting?" This essay, like this book, is both theory and practice. "Vanishing Point" argues for the demolition of the neat resolution of much memoir at the same time it embodies in its very form and freedom the literary and existential excitement of which the openended essay is capable. MONSON'S work as a graphic designer becomes the launching point for questions about "self and production and process and absorption." "Out," he urges himself and us, "always out: my penchant is for opening, not closing, sentences (and parentheses - and em dashes, so that this I can spawn or take on other Is, to expand toward the size of the big starry X that is whatever is coming after this, but not have to reduce back to the previous state, to vanish back into its once and former singularity." This is as close as he is going to get to a direct articulation of his aesthetic and metaphysic. He wants writing to be equal to the chaos and contradiction of the cultural wiki we all contribute and subscribe to, and to be equal as well to the nothingness of nonexistence to which we all are destined. From dozens of memoirs Monson culls hundreds of sentences into three assemblages, effectively dissolving the sanctum sanctorum to which memoir so often consigns the self. Throughout the book, "daggers" - glyphs - adorn various words, redirecting the reader to images, video and evolving text on the book's Web site. Interstitial mini-sections appear among and within chapters, providing the work's theoretical apparatus. An elegy for Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, transforms persuasively into an assertion that the ascendancy of The Story of My Life is an outgrowth of "a generation growing up playing first-person shooters." 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 and for us, that's the crux: he's trying to make himself, make us, feel something, feel anything, do whatever he can to vanquish the numbness that is a result of enforcing "order, decorum," ceremony, formula, expectation, genre-prison. As Lauren Slater wrote in her book "Lying," "There's only one kind of memoir I can see to write, and that's a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark." Memoir is dead. Long live the anti-memoir, built from scraps. Monson sees a post-postmodern world 'starting to secede away from memoir.' David Shields's new book, "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," was published in February.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 18, 2010]
Review by Library Journal Review
In this ultimately disappointing "anti-memoir," Monson (Neck Deep and Other Predicaments) deconstructs the memoir genre in a series of meditations covering such topics as Doritos vs. regular corn chips, his journey to the funeral of Gerald Ford, and the act of Googling yourself. Monson is clever and writes competently, but the book never comes together as a larger synthesis of the disparate meditations.-Elizabeth Brinkley, Granite Falls, WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A freewheeling assortment of essays that bring surprising weight to ephemera like Dungeon Dragons, Doritos and household repair. Monson (Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, 2007, etc.) loosely conceives the book as a commentary on memoir and how the act of storytelling permits writers to carefully structure their identities. The author deploys a number of metatextual flourishes to get that idea across. He places passages from dozens of memoirs together to undercut their claims of unique emotional experience, runs the text of one essay without margins to show how strictly framed many stories are and opens an essay on solipsism by filling two pages with the word "me." Moreover, certain keywords are flagged as subjects for further discussion on his website, otherelectricities.com, implying that any statements made between the covers is unstable. Monson earns the right to much of his gamesmanship, bringing a sharp humor and intellectual rigor to his essays. In "Voir Dire," a piece about his experience as a jury foreman, he performs a close study of how trials are similar to stories, and how we apply our own experiences to others' in the courtroom. "Transubstantiation" opens with an appreciation of snack chips; instead of slipping into the self-obsession he dreads, the author provides genuine insight into the distinction between real and fake, both in Doritos and in personalities. Not all of Monson's pieces reflect such ingenuity. The text is littered with paragraph-long scraps of analysis of memoirs that seem ripe for either expansion or removal. Though the essay on bad pop songs sung by collegiate a cappella groups is good for a good laughs, Monson fails to spin the piece into a larger statement. Role-playing games are right in his wheelhouse, though, and he successfully uses the 2008 death of Dungeons Dragons creator Gary Gygax to consider the nature of obsession with creating "other" selves, and how easily we snap into those roles. An imperfect grab-bag of ruminations that reflect a likable nerdy enthusiasm. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
