Halls of Fame
by John D'Agata, Kate Messner

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Book Reviews of Halls of Fame

Book Review: The Educated Gentleman
Summary: 5 Stars

In the slush of memoirs about the average emotional self-discovery tedium of American 20-somethings' lives, _Halls of Fame: Essays_ is an extraordinary achievement and about as exasperating an enjoyment as a reviewing and reading experience can be for both reader and reviewer. I should know; I tried reviewing it twice but stopped midway during both attempts. As tedious as those trendy memoirs are, it's even more tedious to try to talk about what this book is:

Personal essay? Surely not. D'Agata is unusually coy about his personal life as he gives only tantalizing details about experiences that would be fleshed out into whole books in the hands of lesser writers.

Travelogue? He travels, certainly, but more likely this is a series of journeys and discoveries and even dead ends, which together in one offering are far different from travel writing.

Biography? There's some of that, yes.

But more specifically, D'Aata's been credited with 'inventing' lyric essays, which is a useful term and one often applied to his work. It could in fact be the most appropriate one therefore for this collections of oddball researches into oddball Americans and American ideas: World's Tallest things; presidents of crackpot organizations; demented artists of painting and dance; etc.

But what seems to be the defining characteristic of these essays isn't the weirdness of their subjects (after all, we've seen that before), but instead the odd mix of beauty and ugliness in the style of the prose itself. I was personally at first a little put off by the prose because of it's airy look on the page. D'Agata comes from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, home to his generation's most popular running aesthtic trend, 'the soft avant garde,' as it's been called. Worse yet, he comes to us from there with two MFA's, which suggests his suceptibility to that program's wiles might have been even greater than ususal.

But that is the interesting hitch. D'Agata's not soft in his experimentalism at all. The texts he references suggest a deep-rooted appeal in his young writer's taste for the truly avant garde--the kind of art that involves the reader, viewer, listener, etc., in the very making of the art. Which is where the term 'lyric' probably comes from in his work. For while not only seeking to engage his readership with difficult prose, he also pays out that engagement with an ear for the ancient music of prose that is very likely unparalleled in young writers.

I think here is an essayist--for let us call him what he likes--intent of reviving a dead art, and doing it in the most spectacular of ways.

Summary of Halls of Fame

Essays Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Essays
• United States > Collections & Readers
• Social Sciences