Halls of Fame: Essays

Rating:
Summary: F- Fantastic
Review: d'Agata is a rare, real thing.

Rating:
Summary: Get your essays that are fun to read!!
Review: Flecked with something very different then most other kinds of nonfiction, Halls of Fame: Essays by John D'Agata, offers a unique perspective on America that is always smart and yet also often moving. I found myself laughing while reading, and then just a few pages later I was crying my eyes out. For someone who isn't an english major, I found some of the writing hard, but it pays off if you give the book some time. A challenging and engaging book!

Rating:
Summary: Guess I'm Too Late
Review: Hey, World.

I worked up a whole slew of things to say here, but looks like there are enough now, so let me just say that the book rocks.

I could be more sophisticated, but really: Who's going to read this?

G

Rating:
Summary: Halls of Me Me Me Me Me Me Me!
Review: I discovered this book last semester in a course called Border Genres. It's categorized as "essays" but it's really a work of philosophy. Really excellent! He's not interested in thesis statements like most essays, he wants to make this form a creative genre. I recommend it a lot!

Rating:
Summary: A Tour de Force from a Gifted Young Writer
Review: In _Halls of Fame_ John D'Agata exudes the confidence and free-spirit typical of a twenty-something, while at the same time he has the sharp analytical skills of an older more experienced writer. Someone has compared this young man to Anne Carson and indeed the influence of poetry over this work is obvious, but I kept thinking about the razor-sharp writing of Joan Didion's essays as I was reading _Halls of Fame_. The way this author fashions his words is unlike anything I've read recently, certainly unlike anything I've read by any writer near John D'Agata's age, and definitely unlike anything else that calls itself a collection of essays. Poetic, poignant, evocative, smelling of the underside of American life, _Halls of Fame_ tells the story of a young man but does so through the stories of others. If for anything else, THIS is what sets the book, and its author, apart from its peers: raised on memoir and the "Real World" and "Jerry Springer," generation x seems convinced that navel-gazing makes for great literature. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But this book wants to at least offer a sparkling glimpse at the alternative.

Rating:
Summary: To the World: I Accept Your Challenge
Review: It seems pretty clear that the world has gone insane, since this is in fact the WORST book ever written in nonfiction, instead of what the insane reviews on here are calling the best. So from now on, every good review that this book gets I am going to counter with a negative one. It seems only fair for a book that is not only unreadable but that has copied better efforts by better writers, which has been camoflaged with lots of "experimental" techniques that are neither experimental nor very technically able. John D'Agata is overrated, untalented, and the least informed writer of his generation. These aren't essays, but just masterbatory effects.

Rating:
Summary: Judge the book on its own terms
Review: Let me give you the scoop on John D'Agata. I am a student of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. Before I came I made a point to read everyone's books. I haven't had John D'Agata as a teacher and haven't even seen him yet because he's a freak and a hermit. But this is what I think about his "brilliant" book. Halls of Fame is D'Agata's first book, and you can tell it is. Now that the love fest with him seems to be over, I hope people will be willing to think about this book intelligently. It is a waste of paper. And definitely a waste of money. His "essays" ,if that's what you want to call them, are just hodge podges of bits of information and "observations" that are about as profound as a bowell movement. Just because a guy uses some "experimental" styles while writing in a conventinoal form doesn't make him a "breakthrough!" Get with it people. This is not a good book.

Rating:
Summary: Judge the book on its own terms
Review: Let me preface this by saying I was a classmate of John's at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-90's. I remember discussing several of the essays included in this collection, and being incredibly impressed with both the work and the author. The time, imagination, detail, obsession, intelligence, honesty and humble nature of both the essays and the essayist should at the very least inspire a more attentive read than several of the other negative reviewers chose to give.

It's time to give the Iowa Workshop a break. Just let it go. I mean, really, whether it's jealousy, or a rejected application, or just some strange anti-MFA vendetta, there seems to be a pervasive, generic attack on all who spent time at the school. People, it's just a school, good or bad. It's not some factory that automatically frankensteins each poetry student into some Jorie Graham/Michael Palmer avant-guardian. We actually have our own minds, styles, and ideas, and some of us even hold onto them well after we graduate. Imagine that.

I can assure you, there are few labels that would accurately portray all Iowa workshop students across the board, especially in the poetry program. You have no idea what it was like there unless you were there, and it varies from year to year. I would be uncomfortable judging people who've just graduated the program on the same standards, attitudes and practices I found during my '95-'97 term.

I'm not saying you have to like it, but review the work itself as it is given to you, not the Workshop or the writer's personal life. Why do people have to dismiss or attack writers and their works simply because they come out of a specific school, or because they are popular, or because the author has some success at an early age? Good writing has come out of Iowa, bad writing has come out of Iowa, just like every other MFA program, publishing house, school of thought, or geographical area.

This is an incredible work. Truly dazzling.

And to the reviewer who slams John for "plagiarizing" Dave Eggers, I can tell you that John had already written several of these essays, and published at least one of them in a journal (the Martha Graham piece)years before "A Heartbreaking Work..." was even published.

John is an exceptionally gifted writer and person, but even with all of his talent and imagination, I don't think he has the ability to steal work that didn't even exist at the time. To that reviewer, do your homework before you use serious words like "plagiarism" - John has clearly done his.

Rating:
Summary: Not Essays but OK
Review: There are two duds in this book, the one about a college in the dessert, that I'm not sure even exists, but whatever, and the one about museums. But after that I think it's an intersting twist on what 'essays' mean. okay

Rating:
Summary: A Young Prince of Genres
Review: You'll spend some time scratching your head as you read this book, wondering whether it's nonfiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, fantasy or some amalgam of them all.

Then, at about half way through, you'll stop caring, because at this point you'll have reached the book's title section, "Hall of Fame: An Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter," a not entirely unironic meditation on the 3000 some-odd halls of fame in the United States which acts as both investigative journalism into some particular places the author has visited (there's a hall of fame of "Suffleboard" and a "Burlesque" hall of fame, for example) and personal meditation on the author's own family discord that is never quite clearly expressed but instead lingers overhead making all of these journeys into the halls of fame of America a very desperate, lonely, heartbreaking act.

I have no idea if these "halls" are poems (they look like poetry at least) nor what in the book is real and what imagined (there's an interview with the so-called president of the Flat Earth Society, for example) but I think the ambiguity of the book's forms is intentional, and meant to mask--or maybe even illustrate--an uncertainty in the world that this very mournful but simultaneously witty author feels deep in his bones. This is a tremendous book that is going to change the way essays are made from now on.

Or, if these in fact aren't "essays," it will at least change something in American literature.