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  • “Pop Wrote the Boy”: The Personal-Critical Essayist and Hybrid-Critical Memoir
  • Alexandra Salerno (bio)

Tom Bissell,. Magic Hours.
San Francisco: Believer Books, 2012. 301 Pages, Paper, $14.00.

Jonathan Lethem,.
Talking Heads’ Fear of Music. New York: Continuum, 2012. 141 Pages, Paper, $12.95.

John Jeremiah Sullivan,.
Pulphead. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011. 369 Pages, Paper, $16.00.

In “Up the Mountain Slowly, Very Slowly,” a piece of literary journalism about an experience summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tom Bissell writes of his Tanzanian guide, “In bearing, voice, facial structure, personal charisma, and surname, Kaen was a dead ringer for Captain Katanga, the African tanker captain who hides Indy and Marion from the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I loved this line when I read it, and that love didn’t only come from a knee-jerk, primordial hey, I like that movie, too sense of recognition (though I do have a fierce attachment to Raiders). Instead, I love it because it’s an example of Tom Bissell’s wonderfully insidious pop vernacular. [End Page 167]

It’s this pop sensibility that originally attracted me to Bissell’s writing; the first piece of his I read was an essay in The Believer titled “Nazis, Nuremburg, and Gold-Digging Women,” with the subtitle, “From Blind Date to Shoa, maybe the true evil resides in a failure of our imagination.” Bissell’s essay is ostensibly about reality television, and carries a note labeled “Discussed” beneath the subtitle that The Believer employs as a rule to all of its articles, a pre-Twitter hash tag list. The note reads, “DISCUSSED: Harry Evans, David Foster Wallace, Jean Baudrillard, George Clooney, Michael Moore, Virginia Woolf, Evan Marriott, Corey Feldman, John Updike, Martin Heidegger, Tariq Aziz, Albert Speer, Martin Amis, Adolf Hitler, George Steiner, W.H. Auden.” Yes, Tom Bissell is a writer who does not simply dust an otherwise insightful article with a wide range of cultural references, he crafts a new understanding of a cultural phenomenon by bringing together these varied figures. If you think there is no room in a discussion of reality television for both Corey Feldman and the former deputy prime minister of Iraq, you are not in on the contemporary conversation as practiced by Bissell.

Bissell’s recent collection of essays, Magic Hours, was published by Believer Books, and many of the pieces he wrote for the magazine appear in the book. But not all of them. Not “Nazis, Nuremburg, and Gold-Digging Women.” Not 2005’s “Thriller” (subtitle: “In Defense of a Boyish Genre”), nor “My Anti-War Problem—And Ours” (subtitle: “On A Belated Reading of The Gulag Archipelago”). “Up the Mountain Slowly, Very Slowly,” which appeared in The New York Times’s Play magazine, is also absent. Assembling an essay collection is about what is brought together, but also what is left out.

In his essay “In Defense of the Personal Essay Collection,” Philip Lopate writes:

The advantage of the heterogeneous essay collection by a single author is that it shows you how a particular mind moves through the world. If you are attracted to an essayist’s mentality and way of speaking, ideally you can surrender happily to his or her take on various subject matters, the more diverse the better.

Before the publication of Magic Hours, I had been watching Bissell’s mind move through the world via his magazine publications. I had stumbled from [End Page 168] essay to essay, absorbing Bissell’s incisive, curious, and deeply funny criticism. My reading of Bissell convinced me that the piece of writing that best represents his talents is an essay that ran in Harper’s in 2004 titled “War Wounds,” which documents a trip he took to Vietnam with his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War.

I’m willing to risk focusing too closely on the uncollected versus the collected of Bissell’s essays thus far because I can’t help mentioning “War Wounds.” A moving, deeply personal piece about a son’s understanding of his veteran father, “War Wounds” eventually became the book The Father of All Things, an extended rumination on both family and the Vietnam War. Perhaps its evolution...

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