Book Review 3 - Fake News
Or David Sedaris walks into a bar…
Last year I read 65 books. This is surprising given that I also had a job and - remember these - a fondness for evenings spent at the pub. Missing the pub has become the main topic of conversation this week. The pub, that most British of Britain’s inventions, is more difficult to replicate than I’d imagined. Turns out there is more to pubs than ‘I think I’ll have a pint of lager’, twiglets, unbalanced tables and toilets with doors leading to a carpark. You cannot - well meaning or otherwise - simply recreate them at home. Our attempt involved ordering beers from our local brewery, decent pub attire, cheese and onion crisps with the packet torn down the middle and a discussion along the broad lines of when did £10 no longer mean ten pounds. Alas, nothing doing. My flat is not like that most hallowed of locals, the pub. Maybe it was the lack of a drunk pedestaled, as they always seem to be, at the bar. Maybe it was the absence of a Narnia-like pub front door that propels you less than a metre but seemingly into an enchanted world. We certainly don’t have a wine list that we’ll never bother with. Our sandwich selection is decent but rarely comes with a side of chips.
So now it’s mostly reading, as pubs are out and I’ve been furloughed. Last week this meant consuming an excellent non-fiction book by Annie Dilliard. It falls under the sub-category of non-fiction called auto-fiction, which I think sounds like a sexy way of saying ‘autobiography but make it interesting’. Novels are not, well not often, journalistic endeavours. I wouldn’t suggest that one goes to novels in order to get a factual account of what has happened. In truth I wouldn’t necessarily go to journalists either - but this is another story for another time. The wonderful truth of auto-fiction is that we - the person who inhabits our story and memories - are wholly unreliable. Novelists are far better at writing novels than they are at being reliable re-tellers of the past. Case in point - Oscar Wilde, fabulously good at humour, story-telling and libelling himself. The original, or certainly my original, narrator of auto-fiction is David Sedaris. If you haven’t read anything of his (or listened to him) then I suggest you start with any one of his books, as they are all highly amusing and enjoyable. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself exclaiming This Cannot Be True, I suspect it isn’t.
After starting down the path of autobiographies-as-part-fiction I found myself reading Alexander Chee. His book How to Write An Autobiographical Novel is challenging, compulsive reading and superb. It was also, in my own story, how I stumbled across Annie Dilliard. She was Chee’s Literary Nonfiction teacher at Wesleyan University and in part how he became the writer he is now (and I suspect she would add, always was). Of the lessons she taught him my favourite is perhaps that you should put all your deaths and diseases up front, at the beginning. I also read in Chee’s book this -
“I had made something with some pieces of my life, rearranged into something else”
which sums up far better than this word ramble what auto-fiction might be.
But back to Annie Dilliard and The Abundance.
It starts quickly. The pace never lets up. This reads like a fantastic trip that one might have taken in the 70s with Lucy. Case in point - in the first chapter she describes a Total Eclipse, I’ll let her narrate -
“Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it - that red light of sunset which holds out on snowy mountaintops long after the valleys and tablelands have dimmed. ‘Look at Mount Adams,’ I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember.”
It is easy to understand why Annie Dilliard was given the position of teaching other people how to become writers. She uses words as a bridge, where the starting point is reality and the result is as vivid and bright as her imagination allows. It has all the machinations of a child explaining their ordinary day as though it were the most vivid of dreams. The ordinary becomes fantastical and rich. If you have ever day-dreamed then you will have some sense of what this book feels like to read. Half way through there is a simple story of how, as a young child, she threw a snowball at a car and the driver got out and chased her for several blocks - I’ll let you read the novel to find out where that ends, but it’s very good.
