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For 12
years, Ira Glass has served as host of Chicago Public Radio's
This American Life, a weekly hour-long show featuring
primarily journalistic nonfiction. In this role, Glass has
helped launch the careers of now-prominent authors such as
David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. In The New Kings
of Nonfiction, Glass seeks to further this role with a
collection of favorite essays that not only feature mostly
male writers and a wide array of subject areas but also show
"just how insanely good a piece of writing can be."
The first
story, Michael Lewis's "Jonathan Lebed's Extracurricular Activities"
follows Lebed, the 15 year-old stock "manipulator" who was
prosecuted by the SEC after making several hundred thousand
dollars between September 1999 and February 2000 by posting
artificial stock tips online. Lewis' profile reveals how much
of a normal kid Lebed really is, complete with confused parents,
like-minded friends (who followed his example and began trading),
and an indifferent attitude about his prosecution ("I was
home these days and I was very bored, I wanted something to
do"), and places it into context with the larger social issues
that landed Lebed in the SEC hot seat.
Another
prudent inclusion is Susan Orlean's "The American Man, Age
Ten," a profile of Colin Duffy, a relatively normal ten-year-old
living in New Jersey. She writes, "If [Colin] and I were to
get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. .
.We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn't
have sex, but we would have crushes on each other." Orlean
doesn't go out of her way to create something extraordinary
about her subject; she follows Duffy to school, the arcade,
his home and really attempts to grasp who Colin Duffy really
is—both how he is a product of his environment and where
pop-culture fits into his life. Sandwiched between somewhat
serious pieces, Orlean's piece provides very necessary smart,
comic relief.
Other
memorable pieces include Bill Buford's "Among the Thugs,"
a lengthy (albeit shorter than the original) account of his
trip to Turin, Italy with several unabashedly loyal and violence-prone
Manchester United fans; David Foster Wallace's "Host," which
profiles KFI AM radio host John Ziegler—known for his
aversion to the politically correct working order-- as he
attempts to be both provocative and stimulating every night
for a three-hour program; and sex-advice columnist Dan Savage,
who jumps in with the intriguing "My Republican Journey,"
a story about joining the Republican party and attempting
to change—or at least antagonize—party members on
the topic of homosexuality. The stories in New Kings
are funny and at times outlandish, but most retain their cohesiveness—what
Glass compiles here are stories that aren't afraid to go beyond
the typical interview/profile, but have the wherewithal to
know what makes the ordinary compelling.
Coco
Henson Scales's story, "The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a
Hot Spot" is the only inclusion that seems ill-fit. Originally
published in 2004, what might have been an interesting, even
provocative story instead comes too far after Lauren Weisberger's
The Devil Wears Prada and the reality TV show The
Simple Life to be perceived as original. As the title
so aptly suggests, Scales's brief piece chronicles her year
as a hostess at an über-hip restaurant in Manhattan. The problem
isn't necessarily the subject matter but the delivery; the
story climaxes as Scales escorts Monica Lewinsky out the back
door in an attempt to avoid a (completely fictional) Chelsea
Clinton run-in. Where the other stories succeed in smart analysis,
Scales's turns up empty; it feels shallow and dwarfed in the
collection.
In the
introduction, Glass writes that "we're living in an age of
great nonfiction writing," but there seems to be confusion
over what 'age' he means—the title suggests a new,
if not post-millennial, age, but Lawrence Weschler's "Shapkinsky's
Karma" dates back to 1985 and even the most recent piece,
Chuck Klosterman's "Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things
Seem Crazy" was first published in 2005. However, that's not
to say that articles aren't relatively new (compared
to the 1960s wave including Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, among
others) or that they don't deserve to be included. And with
twelve men and two women, Kings is a very solid collection
of great nonfiction writing. The absence of other popular
nonfiction authors—Joan Didion, Mary Karr, even Sedaris
and Burroughs—is questionable, but the book promises
only Glass's favorites, and with a collection as strong
as this, no harm, no foul.
(November,
2007)
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