This is not a jet-set post, I swear, but once in a weird while, I find myself standing on a beach, dreamily contemplating one ocean …

And then a day or so later, I get to contemplate another:

Summer is rushing by, and I offer the usual apology of negligent bloggers who feel some odd compulsion to explain their absences to their almost-nonexistent readerships. Michael and I got a nice week off in Cape Cod (seen above, as the first tourists arrive in Provincetown, 1620, and immediately open an art gallery to sell paintings of lighthouses). We had bicycle rides, good food, lots of sleep, minimal drag queens. Everything seemed to calm down. I finished reading four (!) books, and wound up skimming another for quite a chunk. All of which the One-Man Book Club will discuss as soon as a quorum can be reached.

Was home for a day, and am now in Los Angeles — here’s Saint Monica herself (also above) keeping watch over her town, humming “Mad About You,” which she hasn’t been able to get out of her stony head since 1986.

The weather is perfect. But this is not neener-neener-I’m-in-Cali time. I’m here for some very serious business about the fall TV season. As I type this, Tom Selleck is doing his best to sell the TV critics of America on his new cop drama on CBS. (How old do you think he is, off the top of your head? Guess. Readers, he is 65, according to IMDb. He was born the same year we nuked Japan — yet he has no stoop, no creak, no spread. Those are some strong bones. Strong mustache too.) Tomorrow, I’m sitting down with some (or all?) of the Real Housewives of D.C. (”Buckle up” a publicist advises.) Oh, and I’m still filing current TV reviews, from one time zone to the next. Here’s a re-consideration, just posted, of Jersey Shore.

After several days of this, I’ll be spending a few more days in New Mexico, working on something exciting and new.

Got a lot of responses to the giveaway of two copies of William Powers’ Hamlet’s BlackBerry. Congrats to B. in LA and T.E. in B’more. And, due to demand, I’m sharing a galley copy with M.C. in Placitas, N.M.

May everyone else find some sort of sanity in this hyperconnected mania we live in! Start with Hamlet’s BlackBerry!

Okay, everyone, settle down, and stop your goddamn clickety-clicking and distracted surfing!

I have analog media to promote (look, a book!), or, if you must, some kindling for your Kindle, an iBook to get your little greasy fingerprints all over. This is the full Tonsil blog endorsement of Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers. It just came out. I got to read a galley a while back. You’ll soon be reading about it in all the right places.

‘Cause there’s a movement afoot, and books to go along with it (such as the slightly, faintly similar The Shallows by Nicholas Carr), and it is this: Everyone slow the fuck down. Where are we going in such a hurry? Are we sure want to go there? What will happen when we get there, besides the death of thinking, writing, keeping, knowing? Is it too late for our crazybrains? Have we already lost contemplation, rumination?

This book gets at all that. It’s a combination of essay, history, and some smart suggestions for unplugging just enough to breathe and consider. William Powers is a friend I’ve never spent time with. I know his wife, Martha Sherrill, better. They both served in the trenches of The Washington Post Style section and wrote tons of great stories, and even long after they left, came to my aid when I had to write “The List” of ins and outs. They now live this tranquil-sounding life on Cape Cod (year round) with their son. From the snowdrifts, they send lovely hand-drawn Christmas cards that cause in me a sort of longing and admiration for their happiness. (It’s okay, I love it.) Check out Martha’s ongoing blog about the local neighborhood dump. No, don’t! Focus on THIS. Stop being so skittish and webby.

Hamlet’s BlackBerry offers a window on life at the Powers-Sherrill household, where there’s an “Internet sabbath” in effect from Friday night to Monday morning. I think a lot of people are able to (or try to) manage that sort of habit — blogger culture has been especially good about upholding a weekend and holiday ethic (”blogging will be light — I’ll be making apple pies for the holiday and swimming in the river and you shouldn’t be online anyhow! See you Monday” etc), if only to project an image of holistic living, i.e., I’m too busy kayaking to blog now.

Alas, for me, too many weekends are spent in some terribly pointless web surfing, blogging, e-mailing, YouTube watching, etc.

William Powers

One of my favorite things Bill wrote (and apparently one of David Carr’s favorites, too) was about the onslaught of “Did You See?” that infected our culture in the mid-2000s. (I like to write it as Didjusee?) It was about the beginning of the Internet all-you-can-eat buffet and the end of people actually reading or considering all the links they were clicking on or re-linking (now called retweeting). It no longer mattered. The question was only  “Didjusee what so-and-so wrote on Slate?” “Didjusee the Lindsey Lohan video on TMZ?” “Didjusee what Mitt Romney told the Times?” Didjusee? Didjusee?

Ah, but did you read it as well? Usually no.

This is a gentle book that describes what’s happening to paper and to life. It starts with Bill musing on what the Internet has done to us, and can any of it possibly be undone, or done better?

Then he even-more-gently walks us through some moments in history when thinkers and writers had to accept technological changes: Socrates had to accept that Gen Y’ers like Phaedrus liked to keep discourses and speeches on scrolls, so they could carry them around read them again and again, without all that talking. In Shakespeare’s world, people had to get used to the new annoying habit of everyone carrying scratch pads around, to take notes and jot down information. (i.e., Hamlet’s BlackBerry, which sort of sounds like one of these.) Gutenberg gave us a world where we could disappear into books and newspapers and tune out the world. (Are you even listening to me? etc.)

Finally, Hamlet’s BlackBerry seeks some ways in which we can make use of our new technologies and still have a life with one another. It’s a beginner’s guide for training oneself to survive the current renaissance — a tumult I think won’t be settled until long after we’re all dead. Forget jobs and media and making a living; I would just like to survive this revolution with my brain intact. Wouldn’t you?

So, hooray for Hamlet’s BlackBerry. I was sent two copies from the publisher and have pressed them into the duties of book promotion. However, I’ve purchased an additional two copies, one for me to keep AND ONE THAT I’M HAPPY TO GIVE TO A DESERVING SOUL. Simply e-mail me here (go to “contact” in the nav bar) before July 16, 2010 and tell me why you want it. (Like we did with Kim Severson’s book.)

PS: Bill’s on tour. If you live in Washington, go see him at Politics & Prose on July 20!

No intro, no explan, nothing but books. Just trying to just say, yep, read ‘em and here’s what the entire book club (still just the one member) thought. Need to clear it all out before the real summer vacation reading starts later this month.

First up, Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis. This is a re-reading, 25 years or so after the fact.

Actually, 23 Julys ago, I think? Here is the cover of the very same copy I read back then and have kept on various shelves in various apartments and dwellings all these years — still smelling faintly of Bain de Soleil and Sun-In and a waft of one’s completely manufactured angst on a semesterly break home from one’s gruelingly existential life at a private college…

You know what? It’s kinda good. It might even be better than you remember it being — even though the final third of the book is a real drag, which I believe may have been the point: the monotony of drugs, wealth, clubs, palm trees. I wasn’t surprised to find it feeling fresh; I was and still remain one of those American Psycho apologists, who admire that novel for its indictment of ’80s consumer culture, or as satire, or as anything besides something worth staging a Take Back the Night march for. Less Than Zero really deserved everything it got, including the haters and the pans, and especially including the bad movie. (Really, an egregious act of adaptation.) I decided to re-read it after all these years, mostly because I’m thinking of reading the overwhelmingly poorly-reviewed Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis’s Zero sequel-of-sorts, when I go on vacation soon. I wanted another looksee.

This time I was struck by how Clay and his world functioned without computers and phones. It’s like reading about pioneers. They were all about instant gratification — the point of the novel is that instant gratification had ruined them (all of us!) forever — and yet they spend pages waiting for one another’s phone calls, pulling over to use pay phones, checking answering machines. I really feel someone should make an incredibly faithful movie version of Less Than Zero now, with 1980s L.A. replicated down to every last detail (using David Fincher Zodiac-style CGI if need be). Sort of the way Rich Linklater did Dazed and Confused and nailed the ’70s in an overlooked way. I guarantee you this time, done right, a Less Than Zero movie would look almost like a comedy. I’d laugh, anyhow.

The only other thing you’d find, reading it now, is the way that Less Than Zero presupposed a world of Kardashians, Lohans, Hiltons, Bachelors and Bachelorettes. Dig this little bit from Ellis’s interview in Details last month:

Q: Years ago people could have read some of your books and said, ‘Oh, this is just nihilism. These people don’t exist! There’s nobody that rich and stupid and narcissistic!’

A: Ha ha ha! Surprise!

• • •

Up next, two books that got reviewed together somewhere — I forget where; Salon? Well, feel free to look it up — but here’s proof that a twinned review of two different titles can actually sucker the book consumer into buying both!

Both of these books try in different ways to get at our national obsession and heartbreak around home ownership, mortgages, domesticity, debt. One’s a memoir, one’s a novel.

The memoir: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, by Meghan Daum. I thought this book moved along okay up to the point where the author settles down with a nice man and buys a house she really seems to like, and we’ve still got 75 or 100 pages or so to go. Then it becomes sort of like watching HGTV every night. (Which Michael and I often do. Aren’t we all more interesting when we don’t have what we want?)

So, the first half was much more engaging — after all, the tale is always taller when you’re broke in the big city and living in shitty apartments and working at shitty jobs and all of the sudden feeling … shitty. People have said this book is good because of Daum’s “courage” to tell it like it is.

But, as a reader, I was miffed by one area in which she held back on telling it exactly: a memoir like this cries out for actual numbers, personal financial data — and I’ve noticed that a lot of these Great Recession and real-estate boom/bust memoirs expect readers to be satisfied with phrases like “mid six figures” or “some money I had in a savings account.”

From Daum, I wanted not only the prices of the L.A. dream houses taunting her from the real-estate listing websites, but her own history of depressing equations, with all the plus signs and the minus signs. Such as: her salary of that first job in the 1990s? The monthly rent on her fondly and not-so-fondly remembered apartments? Credit-card balances at life’s nadir? The precise amount of the advance she got for her novel, which enabled her (at last) to buy real estate? (For a first novel? Does not compute.) I’d even consider putting copies of her tax returns for all the years discussed in this memoir in the back, as Appendix A.

You want to write a memoir about real-estate envy? We need to see the paperwork. Otherwise, it’s like writing a sex memoir with the covers pulled up to your chin.

Meanwhile, the novel is called The Hole We’re In, by Gabrielle Zevin. I stuck with it, even though I started disliking it midway. The author digs herself quite a hole here. It’s got an epic scope that reminded me of Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood, stretching from 1998 into the 2010s. It’s about a religious family in the suburbs, who are up to their eyeballs in McMansion-style credit-card debt. One daughter is a bridezilla; the son runs away to New York for film school; the youngest daughter is disowned and winds up serving in Iraq, and eventually comes home to the ruburbs, where she ends up working in a Walmart analogue. It’s called (unfortunately) “Slickmart.” And Slickmart is locally-owned, instead of being a corporate box store. Slickmart is just one of many wha-hunh? sort of botched details in The Hole We’re In. Zevin’s observational lapses  on details like these disturbs the careful reader, or anyone who’s ever driven across America and paid attention.

Also, the family’s religion is off, in terms of believability. They’re not megachurchers, but instead the author calls them “Sabbath Day Adventists” (which is actually the name of a black church started in New York, sez Wikipedia) and so, instead, they’re a mishmash of evangelical vegetarians who preach an anti-consumerist streak (refusing to shop at Slickmart, e.g.), but are in credit-card debt all the same? It doesn’t add up. Even for a novel. It felt like the author had only read here and there about modern American Christianity and consumer culture. Back to the writers’ workshop for The Hole We’re In, with a suggestion to cut about 10,000 words.

But also? I read The Hole We’re In to the end, so that’s a form of praise. As demonstrated by the cruel, Fifty-Page Test, the One-Man Book Club is fickle.

• • •

Couldn’t help myself, ’twas too curious, and picked up a sale copy of The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee, by Sarah Silverman. (I’m allowed! Look, if the rest of the world can sequester itself with Stieg Larsson mysteries and Twilight novels, can I not spend a day or two reading a half-good celebrity memoir?)

I didn’t want this book for any great reason other than she has intrigued me — funny sometimes, strange always, and willing to say stuff no one else says. I appreciated this spunk, on the fourth page:

I’m not a literary genius. I’m not Dostoyevsky, whoever that is — I’m pretty sure I just made that name up. I’m only thirty-nine years old, with most of my final two years of show business still ahead of me. … I have never struggled with addiction and I was never molested. Tragically, my life has only been  moderately fucked up. I’m not writing this book to share wisdom or inspire people. I’m writing this book because I am a famous comedian, which is how it works now. If you’re famous, you get to write a book, and not the other way around, so the next Dave Eggers better get on a TV show or kill someone or something. …

She’s right, you know. Let’s have another look at some of the list of top-selling nonfiction books (with sales numbers) as of late last year, shall we? Amid all the self-help and Sarah Palin and Teddy Kennedy sales, the eye scans downward, through the top 100 …

Time of My Life. Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi (320,000 copies)

Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin. (201,000 copies)

Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. Chelsea Handler (200,000 copies)

High On Arrival. Mackenzie Phillips. (170,000 copies)

Mommywood. Tori Spelling (146,000 copies)

Here’s The Deal. Howie Mandel (100,000 copies)

You ask: Are those good sales numbers? Let me assure you: FUCK, YES, at least for book authors. Good money for semi-famous comedians, too, I would guess.

Anyhow, the first half of The Bedwetter is as good as any weirdo-girl memoir I’ve ever read, and the back half is exactly as padded out and aimless as any celebrity book I’ve ever read. I loved her guiding moral principle of “make it a treat” (i.e., a modern twist on “everything in moderation”) and there’s a remarkable dose of honest storytelling about her family, especially her funny father. Oh, and she included a photo of a writer from her TV show wearing a co-worker’s hair clip on his dick.

But she really lost her nerve, though, when it came time to describe her relationship (and breakup) with Jimmy Kimmel. She decides, it seems, to turn it into the strangest little two-page allegory about putting a pet cat down. (Pussy euthanasia?)

Best not to think it through too much.

• • •

Wilson, by Daniel Clowes. I hadn’t enjoyed an expensive, hardbound comic book in a while (graphic novel — does it really apply here? I guess so), and Clowes is still pleasingly misanthropic. And, I’ve always liked his strong, commercial-art styleline. And Wilson is jam packed with angry observation.

Like when Wilson is waiting for a flight and asks the man next to him:

What do you do?

Man: Hmmm?

Wilson: Your job? JOB?

Man: I’m in senior management at a small equity firm. And I do some consulting for various–

Wilson: Glaze. No, I’m just kidding. Go ahead.

Man: Well, I–

Wilson: But not with all the mumbo-jumbo. I want to know what you actually DO. Like the physical tasks of your daily life.

Man: Well, like I said, a lot of it involves consulting, with a focus on how to best implement managerial strategies in–

Wilson: Jesus! Listen to me, brother — you’re going to be lying on your deathbed in 30 years thinking “Where did it all go? What did I do with all those precious days?” Some shit-work for the oligarchs? Is that it?

Man: Look, I’m proud of what I do, and I work very hard to–

Wilson:

Wilson’s great, but I wonder if David Boring, a copy of which I gave away ages ago, was a tiny bit better. All the reviews seem to agree that Wilson is Clowes’s masterwork — and there’s something deliciously mean about it. All those New Yorker covers really pay off — probably no better way for a comics artist to achieve legitimacy. Even Michael Dirda seemed taken by it, but his review makes it seem dull, as only Dirda can do. Might do better to enjoy Sam Lipsyte’s review from Sunday’s NYT on this one.

• • •

Finally, Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum. This 2007 book is two books in one, really, printed side-by-side in a two-column page format: On the left side of the page is Hotel Theory, which is Wayne Koestenbaum the essayist, doing a brilliant rumination on, and deconstruction of, the idea of hotels (life in hotels, what are hotels, who are we when we check into hotels; hotels in literature, cinema, television; hotel as a state of mind). Koestenbaum is always a dazzling read on this kind of thing — like his book about opera, or his book about Jackie O.

Then comes the other book, on the right-hand side of each page, called Hotel Women, which is written by Wayne Koestenbaum the experimental poet. It’s a darkly comic novella imagining Lana Turner and Liberace and some other folks trapped for life in a glamorous but terrifying place called Hotel Women. Koestenbaum wrote this part without ever using the words “a,” “an” or “the.” Which makes it all the more beguiling to read.

An excerpt, from the Hotel Women side:

In Hotel Women, Lana Turner and Wallace lay together on mussed sheets, windows open.

“You’re impotent,” said Lana.

“I know,” said Wallace.

“I came to Hotel Women to revive our love life. I brought along your pornography. What else can I do?”

“I’m despicable. I’m more impotent here than in your hacienda.”

“Your impotence is no joke. It’s not cinema, carnival, or concept. It’s genuine tragedy. It’s something wrong with you and therefore wrong with me.”

“If we talk about my impotence, maybe it will go away.”

“We’ve tried therapy, we’ve tried vacation.”

“Do you think this place is bugged?”

She put Wallace’s useless penis in her mouth. Lime Naugahyde furniture seemed powerful in comparison.

“You needn’t continue,” said Wallace. “Maybe I should reciprocate.”

“Don’t bother. It’ll depress me.”

She planned compensatory assignations tomorrow, one man after another, at MGM.

Do you ever get done reading a book and have the realization that, no matter how much you’ve enjoyed it, there is no one to share this particular book with? Sure, I can (and did) go online and find like-minded reviews of Hotel Theory in places like the Believer and Bookforum. But it has recently occurred to me that those people are never my people. Not anybody I actually know, anyhow.

I cannot think of a friend who would want to read Hotel Theory or talk with me about Hotel Theory, but it’s just as well. I can’t think of anyone I would foist Hotel Theory on and say “you must read this and we will talk about it.” Because then they’d have to avoid my questions about whether or not they read it or liked it, and then I’d “owe” them, in a sense, and have to read something they like that I’m not interested in. Sometimes reading Koestenbaum is like reading Gertrude Stein — or Rebecca Brown, D.J. Waldie or George Trow — or one of those authors I’ve just had to puzzle out and find delight in all on my own. Too much has to happen. I might not even recommend Hotel Theory to myself, but I’ve already read it, and thought each little piece of it was exquisite or almost-perfect in one way or another.

And that’s why this is a One-Man Book Club.

• • •

Vacation looms! For the summer dip, I’m considering the aforementioned IMPERIAL BEDROOMS, HITCH-22, DEAR MONEY, THE ROUTES OF MAN, and STATE BY STATE. Any other suggestions?

The members of the One-Man Book Club have been reading ‘em faster than all the members (total: one) can get on here to blogscuss ‘em. I’m going to try to clear out all the One-Man Book Club recent selections this week, and include some selections where the membership couldn’t finish the book. Ready? Chug!

To start, here’s a book I liked very much and recommend to others: Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, by Jake Silverstein, which came out in the spring. I dug it deeply, starting with the title and alluring jacket. But another journalist I know (someone who is really keen about innovation in nonfiction), said he dropped out after page 40 or thereabouts. So there’s that.

Silverstein is the new(ish) editor of Texas Monthly. This book ingeniously and even bizarrely weaves together some of his longer non-fiction pieces (from Harper’s magazine in the ’00s) and short fiction stories (all new), which are all essentially about a young man who’s just trying to find great stories and sell them to big New York magazines.

What is true? What isn’t? I know that sounds like a dreary exercise made for journalism ethics seminars, but there’s something subtly original in how he makes it work, and I’m sad that this book didn’t get a lot more attention when it came out.

Silverstein turns himself into a narrator, a “Jake Silverstein,” who is in his early 20s circa 1999 and, having given up on dreams of becoming a poet, moves to far West Texas to work at a small newspaper and learn to be a journalist. The eight chapters in Nothing Happened and Then It Did are evenly split (and labeled in the contents) as “fact” or “fiction,” and Sliverstein stitches them into a dreamy recollection of what it’s like to be a wannabe writer stuck way out in the middle of the nowhere. My favorite chapter is a fictional one, where the narrator accepts a job driving a famous photographer around the Midland/Odessa landscape that defined presidential candidate George W. Bush; the photographer (irritable, European) has to make one singular photo that will run with an campaign-related story in the New Yorker, which has already been reported and written by a Susan Orlean-like writer whom Silverstein envies from terribly afar.

And I especially admired the tight introduction, in which Silverstein recounts how the Spanish explorers — e.g., Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, circa 1530 — were so mesmerized (or intimidated, or mentally dislocated) by this landscape that they returned with fabricated accounts of what happened to them on their journeys through it. Silverstein writes:

Why did the friar lie? Historians have chewed on this for centuries. … “Since the rarefied atmosphere of the southwestern deserts is very deceptive,” explained a pair of New Mexico historians in 1928, “it may be that the pueblo appeared much larger than it really was.”

A long sojourn in the Southwest provides another explanation. It is unquestionably true that the desert is deceptive, but this may have more to do with its giant solitudes than its refractive atmospheric phenomena. To travel for hours over hundreds of of miles of treeless flatland without seeing a soul is to be forcefully reminded of your inherent aloneness in the world. … I can confirm that is not unusual, in such situations, for the curtain between the real and the imaginary to lift. …

Same goes for <<”Jake Silverstein,” who comes down with a case of gringo-style magical realism and inherent aloneness. He leaves the newspaper job in West Texas for New Orleans, then Mexico, then back to West Texas, always in a clunker Toyota: He is taken with the desolate world around him and half-motivated by a comically deluded sense of self. It’s Don Quixote, cub reporter, adrift on the highway.

There are stories about searching for Ambrose Bierce’s grave site, the grand opening of a McDonald’s in the Mexican interior, a hunt for doubloons in the Louisiana gulf islands and a cross-country road race in Mexico. It’s not trippy, hallucinogenic gonzo journalism stuff in the Hunter Thompson sense.  I’ve never met Silverstein, and now I want to, but my hunch is he may be only somewhat like the “Jake Silverstein” of this book — a castabout who is clearly not on his way to becoming the editor of Texas Monthly.

Halfway through, I no longer cared what was real and what wasn’t and stopped checking the table of contents for confirmation. Biography? Journalism? Coming-of-age novella? Nothing Happened and Then It Did is the first time I felt willing to throw away the carefully tended fences between fact and fiction. His prose isn’t highly stylized (it could be more so), and I skimmed through a couple of the “real” stories I’d already read in Harper’s, but Silverstein’s writing has great momentum. As it went along, I related to his loneliness and his drive (literally, miles and miles) to get a story he never gets. The better stories are the ones he makes up. By the end, as “Jake Silverstein” is deciding to give up journalism, I wanted to know the author a little better than he reveals. This recent Austin Chronicle profile helped with that.

• • •

Next, an example of a journalist doing rural Texas much more straightforwardly and therefore a bit more tediously: Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town, by Karen Valby.

Valby is a reporter for Entertainment Weekly. In 2006, in an uncharacteristic break from its wall-to-wall Harry Potter and Lost coverage, the magazine asked Valby to find a “town without pop culture,” or, at least, a town without the steady bitstream/shitstream of celebrity-logged pop culture that was quickly taking over American society in the mid-2000s.

Valby wound up in Utopia, Texas, which is up in the hill country near San Antonio. I sort of remember that story when it ran in EW; one of the great failings of Welcome to Utopia is that it doesn’t include the full, original article for us to see how this all began, which is the whole reason for the book. True to form, the townsfolk weren’t too pleased with what happened when a big-city magazine writer came to their town to write an arty-cull about them. Once again the great middle-of-America inferiority complex announces itself — we are so offended that you would take time out of your life to come write about ours, you good-for-nothing writer from somewhere else, you.

But Valby decided to return to Utopia (which I think translates to: she sold a book proposal based on the article) and sit among the Utopians for a longer spell. She’s determined to understand Utopia for reasons never quite known. The original premise (a town without pop-culture addictions) quickly dissolved with better phone coverage, Internet access and satellite TV. Without that, I didn’t ever sense what the real theme of Welcome to Utopia is. All books should be able to answer that question, in two parts:

A: What is This Book About? The answer to that should be a couple hundred words, very detailed, sort of like a slightly less advertorial version of the flap copy inside a book jacket and THEN …

B: What is This Book REALLY About? That answer needs to be one very short, very amazing sentence.

I don’t think Valby really gets a handle on part B of the question. Her discoveries aren’t profound, though she does respectfully portray her subjects, including the group of old men every small town has, who meet for coffee in the local convenience store at the crack of each dawn; a black teenage girl at the mostly white local high school; a mother whose sons have all gone to war; a restless teenage boy. Valby either transcribed a mountain of taped interviews and ride-alongs, or she’s extremely good at taking dialogue down in her notes. This is all a lot harder than it looks, and no matter what you end up writing, it will always be the tale of the outsider who visits the natives. I salute her determination to spend several months in Utopia and get to know those people on an intimate level.

But I could only admire that for so long. Welcome to Utopia can be moving, but it starts to drag as it fails to find or make a statement. An old-school editor would say it’s a very long feature story without a nutgraf; Augusten Burroughs compares it to To Kill a Mockingbird. (!!) I wonder if Valby was too worried about projecting a too-strong of point of view — which is my main criticism of so many works of nonfiction. I started skimming along in the last 100 pages, even as Utopia grapples with the idea of a black president. At the morning coffee group, the lone liberal in the bunch regretfully announces he’ll have to vote for McCain. He just can’t vote for a black man.

• • •

SIDE RANT: Like all books about or set in Texas, including my own, both Nothing Happened and Then It Did and Welcome to Utopia must work extra hard to seem “interesting” to people in, let’s just say, New York.

Notice how it never works in reverse; we non-New Yorkers are required to remain eternally interested in (and purchasers of) novels, memoirs and non-fiction books about: New York, Manhattan, a whole lot of Brooklyn; New York real estate, the New York immigrant experience way back when and right now, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Jews, and, less frequently, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Catholicism, especially in the Italian and/or mafia sense; recollections and roman-a-clefs about East Coast college days followed by a move to New York; the New Yorker; New York media, the world in relation to New York; New York food, New York business, New York garbage, sewers, bridges, sex, marriage, divorce, children, politics, crime; New York history; What Would Happen if There Ceased to be New Yorkers on Manhattan island?, etc.

But don’t get me started on this. It’s a big bugaboo right now, and if I get going on it, we’ll be here all fucking night.

• • •

So much praise and <<bestseller glow (and now an Alan Ball/Oprah Winfrey/HBO movie deal) has been heaped on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, that there’s little else I feel I can add or should hurt my fingers typing here. So, some general thoughts:

• It’s as good as the reviews say it is. It’s a scientific page-turner that is also a heart-wrenching family epic. And while it’s perfectly organized and manages a chronology that goes forward and backward, some of us in the One-Man Book Club wondered if the prose sometimes falters. Frankly, too much stylishness probably would have gotten in the way of the story, and the bestseller list would indicate that it hit the sweet spot between literary journalism and CSI.

Skloot made all the right choices, including the parts where she details her quest to get closer to Henrietta Lacks’s children and grandchildren. As much as anything, it’s a book about a determined reporter and a determined batch of cells.

• More than once, the story of the HeLa cells (and the woman who unwittingly donated them) made me think of batty Eileen Welsome and her unstoppable devotion to uncovering and telling the “Plutonium Experiment” stories when we were both working as reporters at the Albuquerque Tribune. Eileen spent, what, seven years or so on that story, plus another six or seven working on a book version. Skloot’s got her beat by a little — 21 years passed between the biology class where Skloot asked her first questions about the origin of HeLa cells and the publication of this book.

• Finally, my biggest overall thought was this: Waitaminnit. I was a terrible biology student, but I was surprised, about midway through The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, to realize the obvious: the HeLa cells are CANCER CELLS. They are the cells of the disease that killed Henrietta in 1951. They are part of her, as cancer insidiously took over her body on a cellular level, but they are not “her,” at least not the same way that her blood cells are.

And anyhow — all human genome mapping developments to the contrary — I don’t easily draw a line from my “cells” to the essential “me”-ness of me. You can clone me, but here I fall back on the philosopher Heraclitus talking about the same-foot-in-the-same-river thing. There is such a thing as a soul, or whatever you want to call it, and it eludes the Petri dish.

I was therefore sort of saddened by all the mythological thinking — the premise of this book — that orbits the origin story of the HeLa cells as the years go by: Her family thinks the cancer cells are their mother, almost in a Frankenstein sense, and who can blame them? But, in a way, the scientists also speak strangely (for scientists) about immortality here, of Henrietta’s ongoing contribution to science. They hand out awards to honor her and her family, mainly in order to minimize the fact that Johns Hopkins took Henrietta’s diseased cervical tissue without her permission and started reproducing the cells and selling them.

The scientists (and Skloot) seem all too willing to play metaphorical make-believe about a poor black woman who, in a way, posthumously travels all over the world, helps science cure diseases, and even takes a ride to outer space. (Also worrisome is how the HeLa cells, unchecked, contaminated other samples and possibly set cancer research back several years in the 1960s; it slightly negates the principal narrative of a book about HeLa’s contributions to science.)

Whether talking to researchers or to Henrietta’s daughter and sons (who struggled with the basic science), Skloot makes that thematic point over and over: Henrietta lives on. I don’t quite see it like that. A form of Henrietta’s cancer lives on. Or did I miss something?

• • •

Before I knock off for the night, let me get three books off the table that failed the One-Man Book Club’s FIFTY-PAGE TEST. That’s right — the books that failed to keep me going after page 50.

Never the fault of the book, of course. I rarely let a book into the house that didn’t interest me in some way — either from a review, or publicity (an NPR interview, e.g.), or an attractive jacket, or the recommendations of people I trust. So failing the Fifty Page Test is almost always the fault of the fickle, difficult One-Man Book Club…

<<The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. So sue me. Tried FOUR TIMES since 2007 to get into this novel and just can’t. But it’s so wondrous, you say, and it won a Pulitzer. Fine. But I need to move on.

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, by Michael Greenberg. See my rant above about New Yorky books by New Yorky New York writers. This was wrongly touted (to me, anyhow) as a moving memoir about the ups and downs of the writing life. It’s actually a collection of short columns the author penned for the Times Literary Supplement. Redundant themes in p. 1-50: He didn’t get along with his tough, workaholic father. There’s nothing like New York. He’s just a man, a man making his way every day in the word-business of New York. Writing is a bitch but he can’t let her go.

Etc., etc. Zzzzzzz.

<<American Voyeur: Dispatches From the Far Reaches of Modern Life, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. My thinking here was that, if I read Denizet-Lewis’s feature stories collected in once place, I would see something special about them that had eluded me when they ran in the New York Times Magazine. After a rather dry and perfunctory introductory essay, the stories all started to feel like homework and I checked out. This book is in every way the opposite of Nothing Happened and Then It Did, which for me has set the new gold standard for getting people to read one’s old magazine pieces.

The House of Tomorrow, by Peter Bognanni. It came highly recommended and I set it aside for a rainy Sunday when I was free and needed to jump into a good debut novel. This one is about a kid and his grandmother who live in a Bucky Fuller dome and museum. I didn’t get too far past p. 50. It was just going too slow for me; the characters were exhibiting a weirdness that seemed too much like fiction-class weirdness. It’s a real bummer when someone you admire and like insists you read a new, very good novel, and she even arranges to have it sent to you from the publisher; then I let down that trust and enthusiasm by not being able to get into it. Part of my deep guilt complex is feeling somehow responsible for that, which is crazytalk.

This is why we drink at the One-Man Book Club.

MORE TO COME THIS WEEK, if there’s time: Sarah Silverman’s THE BEDWETTER! Megan Daum’s LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT IF I LIVED IN THAT HOUSE! Gabrielle Zevin’s THE HOLE WE’RE IN! Daniel Clowes’s WILSON! William Powers’s HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY! And a 25th anniversary re-reading of LESS THAN ZERO!

The young man pictured here comes to us courtesy of the Mary Degnan Archives. (Mary was inspired to re-examine a box of old photos after seeing her work on this particular subject matter here at Tonsil a month ago.) This picture was taken in the spring of 1987, when I was 18 and a freshman at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Don’t be afraid of the dilated stare and the sharp knife — it’s just another Wednesday production night at the offices of the Maroon. I was good with an X-acto.

I miss layout. It was probably the only crafty, tactile skill I ever mastered — starting in the journalism room in high school. I miss the waxer, the long strips of freshly developed type set in column inches, the bordertape, the pica poles, the photo reduction-ratio wheels, mitering my corners, the Zip-o-Tone Zip-a-Tone [thanks, Nancy], the 20-percent gray screen half-tones, the light-tables; writing headlines from count orders (”they need a 3-36-1 in 19-pica column width, and don’t forget that flitj only counts for half a character”). I miss the monstrous and cantankerous photostat machine. I miss light blue Copy-Not pens. I miss being able to fix a typo with a knife instead of a reset.

I miss the satisfaction of moving the page flats over to the “finished” side of the boards, where we would burnish them silly and would then hold them up to the light and put masking tape behind the stray X-acto nicks. I miss piling into Tim Watson’s car to drive the flats down to Dixie-Web press off Tchoupitoulas Street at 3 a.m. (Or 4 a.m. Five a.m., on really bad weeks.) I even miss the heartbreak of seeing the paper 24 hours later and noticing all the bad nicks and crooked lines.

All of those skills are now completely obsolete.

I think I derived the same joy from laying out a newspaper that quilters derive from quilting bees. It required concentration, measurement, technique, artistry — but it never distracted you from conversations and gossip and laughs with your collaborators. No matter what sort of worries I had in life (it seems unthinkable to me that I had any worries in 1987, but of course I did), there was nothing more gratifying than a long, hard night of layout, with WTUL on the radio (or a mix tape). The paper came out Friday mornings. We’d close (or try to close) the features and op-ed pages on Tuesday nights, and then the news and editorial pages on Wednesdays — as late as it took, but our printer deadline was technically midnight. We’d usually get the flats there by 3 a.m.

(These pictures, from somebody else’s newsroom backshop, sort of dial the time machine a little too far in reverse, but you’ll get the idea.)

The beginning of the end.

Around the same time Mary took that knife-in-mouth picture of me, we started converting from Compugraphic typesetting machines to the newfangled Apple Macintosh Plus computers (with 80 MB hard drives!). Although Loyola’s Apple team insisted we’d be able to entirely paginate the paper, no sweat, it was something of a disaster for many semesters. We had to cobble together a system on a flimsy “Apple-Talk” network, by which we “typeset” our stories into columns using a “laser” printer. As production manager that semester, I started tentatively experimenting with building boxes, column sigs, and folios on the screen, using Aldus PageMaker or MacDraw.

Laying out a page (or a poster or a book jacket or a brochure) on the screen also has its pleasures — as millions of present-day graphic designers in all forms of media will attest. But it’s hard to match the feeling of laying something out by hand. I guess this is really just more nostalgia for the idea of slowness, craft, the physicality of media.

Not just a bit phallic, eh?

I wish I could start a Layout Club, for people of a certain age who used to love doing this. We could be like those people who rebuild old video game consoles and whatever else. We would banish all forms of desktop publishing technology prior to 1985. We could hunt down and restore an actual typesetting terminal and developer. We could cobble together some waxers, X-acto knives, other supplies; find or build light-tables and boards. We could meet in someone’s garage. We could put music on and just run out type and lay out a newspaper that would never even have to get to printed. We would miter corners and do color-separation flips. Mostly we would just trade stories and laugh and go home and discover stray strands of “Harvard-rule” border tape in our hair.

Does that sound like a fun time or what? I’ll bet hipsters would love it, just for the retro feel.

What seemed like half the freshman class of Bishop McGuinness High School went to see the Go-Go’s on their Vacation tour at the Oklahoma City Myriad Center University of Oklahoma Lloyd Noble Center (speak, memory! Or speak, Derba! Or, you know who would really know — Andrea Martinez). Thanks to the interwebs, I can at least confirm that this happened on October 2, 1982. We had the beat.

A couple days after that, this kid named Mark Marron — who was an ADD thug with a frightening overbite; one of those total assholes who always shows up in movies about how awful high school is — declared the Go-Go’s to be lesbos and called me a fag because I had the Rolling Stone cover of the band (the Annie Leibovitz photo of them in their bras-and-camis) taped up in my locker. I took it down. What a horrible feeling, even now.

From then on, none of the boys (except me) openly liked the Go-Go’s, and all of the girls did. You could write an academic paper on 1980s Bible Belt adolescent gender identification rituals about that — but do include the whole boys-who-play-Ms.-Pac-Man thing as a corollary. (A happier memory: The crisp air of the October 1984 evening the Go-Go’s came back, junior year, on their Talk Show tour and played the OKC Zoo Amphitheater. Utter bliss — dancing around with the cool girls. By then I did more or less what I wanted. What a difference two years makes.)

I stuck with the Go-Go’s even after they broke up. I liked Jane Wiedlin’s Blue Kiss album in ‘85, and I might have (might have) sang along into a hairbrush with Belinda Carlisle’s “Mad About You” a time or two. Svelte, redhead Belinda’s Heaven on Earth is surely one of my all-time guiltiest pleasures, so out of tune (and actually out of tune, on some cuts) with the 120 Minutes aterna-guise I tried to latch onto in college. I stick with them even now: Four tickets to see their “farewell” (yeah, right) reunion tour next month at Wolf Trap. That’ll be $188, please.

What a long way to get around to telling you that the One-Man Book Club seized upon a copy of Lips Unsealed, Belinda Carlisle’s new memoir, upon spying it the other day on the new-releases table in Borders. I had no idea it was even in the works. (I haven’t paid Belinda any attention in years, except to watch her gay son’s YouTube videos.)

Look, I’ve got my own deep nostalgia trip going on lately. I threw my 20-year-college-reunion invite in the trash. I’ve been making a massive playlist of “college songs” and I’m thisclose to dragging out my Mac Plus one of these nights, to plug it in and read all the old letters and musings stored on its hard drive. I don’t need a Belinda Carlisle book just right now, thanks, but …

Well, if you insist.

Here’s the thing: I’ve always wondered why Belinda became so successful, post-Go-Go’s, for doing stuff that is so mediocre. (And actually, the Go-Go’s are not arguably brilliant, either. That was more about a moment and a look and a pop-culture shift from the ’70s to the MTV ’80s.)

Guess what? Belinda wonders the exact same thing.

This book is a horribly wonderful study of the essence of mediocrity, told by someone who’s just as baffled as you and I are about it. I read the book in a night. We go from her mildly unhappy childhood in the San Fernando Valley to the punk heyday in Hollywood, where she lived in the legendarily filthy Canterbury apartment building and knew all the seminal punk and new wave rockers of the “Rodney on the ROQ” era. That’s where the Go-Go’s started — all the stuff you’ve heard before; the dresses made of trash bags, the boozin’ and floozin’; the evolution from unskilled girls with guitars to bubblegum rock group. Who doesn’t love a drug-fueled rock memoir? Once again, I had to get up and go to the kitchen spice rack so I could remind myself: How much is half a gram?

Well, those grams add up. Belinda put so much toot up her nose over the years — to hear her tell it, for pages and pages and pages, it sounds like it stopped being fun around 1985, but she was just getting started. Count me as one of those suckers who believed, when we saw the video for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” or saw her anti-drug “Rock Against Drugs — RAD!” public-service ads, that Belinda looked so good because she kicked drugs. See?

That is not the case. She marched to Bolivia for another 20 years; went on a three-day coke binge as recently as 2005, in a London hotel room. But, she writes, she’s been sober since then — thanks to the usual discovery of Jesusless spirituality, including trips to the river Ganges and dinner parties with Deepak Chopra. Eh, whatever works. Belinda, you’ll understand if we wait and see?

More intriguing is the undercurrent of showbiz that pulls Belinda along as an unenthusiastic celebrity who barely qualifies as a musician — from one bad solo record to the next, through the years, most recently finding herself quickly eliminated on Dancing with the Stars.

The refreshing (and depressing) part is how much blame she’s willing to take. Every time she heard a new recording of her voice — from “Our Lips Are Sealed” on down — she cringed. (America cringed, too, eventually; but Europe loves her.) There’s a great scene when the young Go-Go’s first hear a tape of their debut album, Beauty and the Beat. It was so not the edgy, punk record they set out to make. They were mortified. But the deal was done. Mediocrity worked its ineffable magic. Hank Stuever spent his allowance on it, many times over.

You know what she’s good at? Being a Go-Go. Michael and I went to see them four years ago at the 9:30 Club. They played every track from Beauty and the Beat, in order, to celebrate the album’s 25th anniversary.

I looked around. All the new wave girls from everyone’s high school were there, along with their very best gay male friend. Everybody get on your feet / We know you can dance to the beat…

… This will be my song of the summer. What’s going to be yours?

Best Coast, “When I’m With You.”

The Tonsil Blog’s One-Man Book Club is back together, this time at Hank’s place. (Okay, every time at Hank’s place. Isn’t a book club so much nicer with one member?)

It’s been long enough since the last meeting that the beverage of choice has switched from a wintry red (malbec) to a nice, crisp white (vinho verde). Although it’s been a long time, the club has been busy reading a buncha new books.

I’ve admonished the One-Man Book Club to try to be more capsule-y this time, but no promises. If it goes too long, that’s the vinho verde typing, I want you to know.

The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. I was gobsmacked on just about every fucking page by some painfully beautiful or hilarious or otherwise perfect sentence in this novel. I loved Home Land, too, and The Ask did not disappoint me — in fact, I feel like it surpassed Home Land.

Any writer who’s plumbing the aging issues of so-called Generation X (or wishes to observe our already-very-observed monster-stroller, overpriced-coffee, real-estate-yuppie-envy era of almost evil self-interest and hurt) will read this and want to just give up. It’s that good.

It’s about a guy, Milo Burke, who works in the development office of a mediocre college (which Milo actually refers to each time as Mediocre College). He loses his job because donations and big gifts are way off in the recession and he’s not producing any new “Asks.” Also they don’t like him. But they bring him back to facilitate a big gift from a wealthy donor (aka “the Ask”) whom he went to undergraduate school with. This is a very dark satire more than a nuanced novel — Lipsyte skewers marriage, aging, money, Internet culture, selfish elderly parents, and the way that Gen Y’s utter swiftness and hipness can get under the skin of guys my age. Oh, and there are so many wickedly uncomfortable scenes. Such as when you wake up and your wife is breast-feeding your 4-year-old, who is kicking you in the chest while he slurps away:

“Baby,” I wishipered. “What the hell are you doing? You weaned him. He’s weaned.”

“I know he’s weaned.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re snuggling.”

“He’s sucking.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I’m not,” said Bernie.

“Maura, come on, stop it.”

“It’s okay. It’s just a little regression. It’s normal. I read about it. I don’t have any milk anyway.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Go back to sleep, Milo.”

“Yeah, Daddy, go back to sleep.”

Chilling, awkward, hilarious, sad, and extremely well-crafted. A One-Man Book Club Top Pick.

• • •

I don’t have a whole lot specifically to say about Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, by Melissa Milgrom. But I should say that it was co-edited by Amazing Andrea, who edited my book, so that right there made me want to read it.

It’s exactly what it says it is, though I’m not convinced the “adventures” label quite applies. The adventure sort of finally comes near the end, when Milgrom attempts to stuff a dead squirrel and see if it’s anywhere near the standards of pro taxidermists. Still Life is  one of those books that tries to get a handle on a broad subject by traveling to and writing about a lot of examples of the subject and people who are obsessed with the subject, which can wind up seeming like a series of magazine articles on the subject.

Critics have given Still Life pretty good notice, but it seems like everyone (including the One-Man Book Club) was hoping to read more of Milgrom’s deeper thoughts about the allure and mystery of taxidermy. The writing and sense of voice is always trickiest part of a book like this. It’s a lovely book to hold and look at, though — what a terrific cover and paper stock, all around. It opens with Milgrom’s profile of David Schwendeman, the last official taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History, and his son, Bruce, who run a taxidermy shop in New Jersey. Milgrom could have stayed put and built a book around them, perhaps. Instead, the author is off in different directions: to England to talk about all that Damien Hirst stuff (haha, no pun intended) and then follow the auctioning off of a bizarre, Victorian menagerie of taxidermied creatures that have been assembled into 19th-century domestic scenes and dioramas. She also goes to the world taxidermy competition. (Of course there’s a world taxidermy competition. In these sorts of books, there’s always either a world competition of the [insert Weird Subject Matter here], or an annual convention of [People Who are Obsessed by the Weird Subject Matter].)

The facts and quotes and history and scenes start to stack up, and it’s really up to the writer to either do something entirely new or stylistically provocative with the prose. For all its reporting and research skill, I didn’t feel like Still Life quite did that kind of thing, but I did keep thinking it was tightly sewn, which seemed metaphorically apt.

>>TANGENT ALERT!<<

This isn’t Still Life’s fault, but reading it made me think of countless other books that are shelved in “cultural studies” (hello, make room, I’m squeezed in there too) that each try to be a broad survey of something Big and/or Odd, in order to prove that it is … Big and/or Odd. I’m thinking here of that disappointing Rebecca Mead book a few years ago about the wedding-industrial complex — One Perfect Day — where she went all over the world and gathered examples of the Bridezilla culture and then didn’t say anything. Mead’s book had an amazing cover (it was a receipt stapled to an engraved wedding invitation, see?) and yet it just fizzled and pooped all the way through. It was about something outrageous and bizarre and hilarious and heartbreaking and yet it was no fun.

These are books of reportage. Most of them lack full narratives, and instead provide glimpses and partial narratives in the form of topical profiles. They always look like they might be absorbing and strange and then often aren’t. They’re always coming out, though — books about NASCAR, about garbage, about sushi, about Chinese food, about poker, about competitive-eating contests, about beauty pageants, about spelling bees, about toilets, about interstates, about everything. My friend Mike Schaffer did a very good one about the pet industry. I maybe could have done my book about America and Christmas that way — traveled the country more, given shorter glimpses of more examples, hopping from here to there for a more “complete” and straight-journalistic picture of the holiday industry and economy. Instead, I chose to hunker down in the same place with a few people and do the story that way.

I don’t think a case can be made that one way is more right or not, because it really depends on the book. But I do wonder what convinces publishers to greenlight these sort of “a journey into the world of …” or “dispatches from the strange world of …” proposals from authors, which are basically built around a writer hitting the road to explore a subject in a survey approach. If I was an editor considering those kinds of proposals, I’d want to know what the underlying thread will be. I’d want point of view — which is different from and more nuanced than a book that will be opinionated. It’s about voice. When people pay $25 for a book (or $10 for the e-book), I feel like they’re giving you permission to write the hell out of it and have something to say.

• • •

All right, everything I just said? About books needing more style, more voice, more viewpoint, more artful writing? And what I posted on this blog earlier this month, Michael Brick’s screed about those readers and editors who complain about something being “overwritten”? Well, get ready for the radioactive blast of my contradiction bomb. Get ready for About a Mountain, by John D’Agata.

Oh, how I scowled while reading this PATHETICALLY OVERWRITTEN book, all the way to the very end. (It’s not very long. I kept throwing it across the room in disgust and then had to go retrieve it, so I could continue not liking it. So that’s actually kind of a compliment.) I am fascinated by John D’Agata’s writing, and, clearly, so is John D’Agata.

Also, there is a blurb on the front, transmitted from the grave of David Foster Wallace: “John D’Agata is one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.”

One of. The past few years.

Well, I don’t think so, but I do think he is one of the most egregious Joan Didion imitators I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something, because it takes one to know one. (He who smelled it, dealt it. Smeller’s the feller. Etc.) And I don’t mean the ’60s-style “Goodbye to All That” kind of Didionesque prose that everyone equates with “writing like Joan Didion,” but the later Didion; the post-Miami/pre-Magical Thinking Didion; the ’90s Didion of all those dense New York Review of Books articles, who piles up statistics and figures and half-quotes taken from deep down in news articles or beneath layers of official reports and sculpts it all into long, lush sentences of ominous doublespeak. That’s the Didion that D’Agata is mimicking here. Really, this whole book is Didion karaoke.

The mountain in About a Mountain is Yucca Mountain — the much maligned, questionably unsafe, and recently derailed Nevada site chosen to house the nation’s nuclear waste into eternity. Yucca is always an interesting subject, I guess, but this is more about how D’Agata learned about it, read it about it, visited it, and then wrote 200 pages of dreamy, spooky, I-just-discovered-the-West, essayistic words about it.

D’Agata teaches creative writing at Iowa. He’s part of that wide world of “creative nonfiction” that I know very little about. Since I’ve worked in newspaper journalism all my life, I’m usually surrounded by people who get grouchy and prickly around the idea of “creative nonfiction,” where the rules of reporting and attribution appear to be looser, because adhering strictly to the “facts” has a way of inhibiting the art of fluid prose. I sort of straddle the fence. I like nonfiction that is diligently reported, cuts no corners, and is as accurate as humanly possible, and THEN has the courage to be imaginatively written and provocative in form and structure.

About a Mountain has, if nothing else, helped me decide where to draw the line. Here’s what you learn from D’Agata, once you get all the way to the “Notes” at the end:

“Although the narrative of this essay suggests that it takes place over a single summer, the span between my arrival in Las Vegas and my final departure was, in fact, much longer. I have conflated time in this way for dramatic effect only, but I have tried to indicate each instance of this below [in endnotes]. At times, I have also changed subjects’ names or combined a number of subjects into a single composite ‘character.’ Each example of this is noted.”

Why he had to do all this, I’m not sure. Why he chose this subject, I’m not sure — other than he had to help his mother move to Las Vegas and the place creeped him the fuck out. Clearly he was somewhat interested in the unsolvable dilemma of nuclear waste, but not too terribly much. Why he thought it would be a good idea to bother the parents of a teenager who jumped to his death off the Stratosphere hotel, so that their son’s death could work as some clumsy metaphor for Yucca Mountain, I don’t know.

I keep hearing that we’re leaving journalistic diligence behind; that creative nonfiction is really where it’s at in this era of Truthiness. It’s starting to feel more uppity and old-fashioned to complain — and anyhow, just look at all the kids who still, 40 years later, wave Hunter S. Thompson around and claim his hallucinogenic journalism is the truest thing ever written.

About a Mountain did fascinate me in its later-middle chunk, which artfully rehashed the ongoing debate among linguists, artists, and scientists about how to design a way to warn humans or other future beings to stay away from the Yucca waste tunnels. Maybe they should leave a quote from David Foster Wallace on the lid?

• • •

We’ll there’s more, but not tonight. I hogged all the time and drank all the wine. The One-Man Book Club will be back soon for one-sided discussions of the following: WILSON by Daniel Clowes; NOTHING HAPPENED AND THEN IT DID by Jake Silverstein; THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot; and THE BEDWETTER by Sarah Silverman. YES, all of those, plus three books that failed to pass the 50-page test!

And anyhow, what are YOU reading? Give me some good recommendations. Nothing written by anyone named Stieg.

I only thought I’d typed my last words about Lost for The Washington Post. This morning, post-finale, it turned out we really needed someone to make the case for purgatory, amid all the other theories we were posting, either by Liz Kelly and Jen Chaney (our in-house “Lost” PhD’s), or from lots of devoted readers. Here’s what I wrote, which is getting me lots of argumentative e-mail in return. It’s online only. (We’ve decided that we’ve killed enough trees trying to elucidate Lost.)

IT WAS PURGATORY, PEOPLE

By Hank Stuever / (c) The Washington Post / posted on May 24, 2010 (updated version)

In the fall of 2004, when “Lost” was amassing what turned out to be its incredibly dedicated audience, there were viewers (I was among them) who said: Maybe the island is just purgatory. Maybe everyone on Oceanic 815 is really dead (killed in a plane crash, obviously) and they are trapped somewhere between a dark place and a heavenly afterlife. This theory made the most sense, and it didn’t lessen the show’s best qualities one bit.

But the more-involved fans hated the purgatory theory. No, no, no, they said. It’s a real place — and look, see? It was a science experiment. There was a hatch and a series of numbers being entered into a computer! If it’s purgatory, then how come people actually die? There are “Other” inhabitants. This story goes way back to Egypt, dude!

But can’t that all be purga—

No! See? The flash-forwards? The six survivors who go back to the real world?

But what if that world is also purga—

No! Because look, they set off a bomb that split everything into two realities, one on the island and one in an alternate sideways world!

But maybe that’s because it’s purga—

No!

I don’t know what the rest of you 13 million people were watching Sunday night, but in the last five minutes of “Lost’s” insanely overlong finale, I realized that the purgatory camp had been right all along, that Occam’s razor (the simplest solution is usually the correct one) had worked. “Lost” was a story about purgatory.

Yes, the show’s creators vehemently denied all along that the island was purgatory. Fans, being fans, took them at their word — which, by the way, one should never do. Snap out of your Comicon-style “ ‘Lost’ community” daze and realize that this is showbiz and the customer base must be sustained and strung along. “Lost” frequently abused its viewers’ time and patience and, masochistically, its core viewers stuck around and asked for more. What is purgatory, after all, but a series of torture devices?

Maybe the word “purgatory” is the problem. What about limbo? (It’s been too long since Catholic school for me to fully recall how purgatory is different from limbo. We used to pray for the souls of dead babies in limbo, whom we felt sorry for, because they didn’t have television. Maybe saying the word “purgatory,” for “Lost” diehards, feels too much like finding Bobby Ewing in the shower (“Dallas”) or listening to Dorothy babble about Oz after her barnyard concussion. One thing people despise is an “it was all an illusion” ending, but tell that to “The Twilight Zone” or Ambrose Bierce. This much I know: ABC is counting on us to argue about this forever, so they can somehow show us even more commercials than the ungodly number they showed Sunday night.

Now let’s broaden the definition of limbo or purgatory, to allow that the all of the people who came and went from “Lost’s” island were technically corporeal — alive. They hungered, fell ill, needed shelter, had sex. You could die on this limbo island, which only makes it worse for your soul. This allows the island to be sorta-real. Some people in “our” world know it exists and seek to get there, to unlock or exploit its energy. Others just wash up there. Everyone who is there belongs there. Maybe for a while, maybe forever.

Jack Shephard and his fellow travelers were unwittingly brought there to resolve a number of problems between heaven and hell. They were fresh souls, there to address a few too many anomalies and broken-machinery issues in some sort of working universal order.
During their time in purgatory, the Oceanic people (helped by other lost souls, such as Juliet and Desmond and Faraday) brought parallels together and eventually they prevented the devil’s meddling attempt to return to heaven and destroy creation. They blew up the Dharma Initiative in the 1970s, because it also threatened the island’s energy. They killed the Smoke monster. They altered time/space without killing the rest of us. Big jobs.

This limbo followed them backwards and forwards and sideways into a tangle of past, present and alternate future. The characters finally fixed it. Their reward was the hereafter.

People in “Lost” died multiple times in a lot of ways. Jack’s exit in the final minutes of “Lost” was the death that got him to heaven, but the 815 crash was the death that got him busy on what he was meant to do. That’s why the finale takes Jack back to that same bamboo field — where he snapped awake in 2004 (dead, but not technically) and where, now that he is fully cognizant of all that has happened (and un-happened), he lays down and experiences a final peace. His work is done.

I know some hardcore fans don’t want to believe it was purgatory all along, perhaps because they worked so hard to decipher “Lost’s” layers of pointless mythology and whatnot. This is not an “it was all a dream” ending. It was about another realm that is like a dream, which explains why everything had to be so frustrating, complicated — like a dream where you can’t solve a problem.

But not a dream. An actual place — a purgatory. Or for people who hate that word, an in-between. You don’t go there simply because your soul is stuck. You go there because you’re needed.