Stringing Us Along

In one node of the website accompanying (or extending or co-extending) Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, Ander Monson writes, "I am a believer in more, in muchness, in increasing availability and iterations of a piece of art. I fetishize, I obsess." Readers are cued toward the node by typing one of dozens of words (in this case, "bonus") that Monson glyphs with a dagger in his text, thus webnoting them. Whether we trust the claim as Monson's own is up for grabs. The book, after all, explicitly and implicitly questions the stability, integrity, and referentiality of the I narrator in that most ostensibly I-centric genre: the memoir. And yet, this is certainly a book of muchness.

It's a book in which one essay, "Solipsism," (twice previously published) begins with 1,003 repetitions of the word "me," then braids into a two-column format before yielding a three-columned footnote, all shot through with web-pointing daggers. A variation of that technique shows up in the essay "Transubstantiation," which begins with Doritos and two-columns itself toward an end in an Arizona Titan Missile museum gift shop. Muchness manifests differently in "Exteriority," an essay scoffing at marginal decorum, each line's first and last letters blurring off the page, Monson careering among the world's largest ball of paint, video games, home remodeling, television, Grand Rapids, silence, and walls. Scrapbook-like, "The Essay Vanishes" presents photographs, lists (both found and the author's own), and note scraps, all interleaving white- and asterisk-spaced chunks of texts in lyric juxtaposition, in a way that, say, E. B. White did decades ago in essays like "Spring," sans graphics.

My point in these characterizations is that Monson is playing both graphically and thematically with conventions that, if not entirely new to nonfiction, at least scrape against traditional notions of memoir. He especially flouts familiar desires for coherence and connection, though we've seen smooth linearity exploded before, most notably in Joan Didion and Annie Dillard. Too, he ponders issues of the reliability of memory and the truth value of first-person nonfiction, which is hardly the first turn around this block. And yet Monson does some with more aplomb than the usual handwringing over how big an asshole James Frey really is or the essayist's inviolable compact with Truth.

Most striking among the book's nineteen essays, divided and intercut now and then by asterisked interchapters (like those, say, of In Our Times), the first about the asterisk itself, are three pieces titled "assembloirs," each a collage of excerpts drawn from 75+ other authors' memoirs, stitched together with disarming coherence. The strategy parallels David Shields's in Reality Hunger (2010), and, as in Hunger, it challenges assumptions of authorship. The difference here is that while in the first two instances ("Assembloir: Disclaimer" and "Assembloir: On Significance") the passages are pithy observations or philosophical ruminations, their nature changes in the third. In "Assembloir: Ending Meditation," we read passages like "I am most grateful to a woman named Mrs. Strange, my first foster mother" or "We scatter Anthony's ashes in the ocean." Following memoir convention, these tacitly present as experiences lived by the "I" narrator—but of course they aren't, or they are, but the I isn't Monson. While Monson may seem to string us along, save for the smugly well-read readers who glint passages, he makes the game plenty clear. On the one hand, the assembloirs provide fine fodder for undergraduate lit students scavenger hunting the sources and contexts of the original passages. On the other hand, though, the deftness of the handpatching, like well-taped and mudded drywall, neatly questions just what a memoir author authors.

I'm not sure that the memoir genre or the essay really needed its Laurence Stern or John Barth, really needed the metanonfictional exposing/exploding of conventions. For me, at least, the game gets a little weary, and I long for the narrative glints and meditations, the information about Gerald Ford's funeral, the process...