Neil Serven

I decided to read David Rakoff’s Fraud, which had been sitting on my shelf for a while. I had bought it used and remembered there being a lot of hype surrounding the book when it came out, I think because Rakoff was viewed as an heir apparent of sorts to David Sedaris. Like Sedaris, he had a number of essays featured on This American Life. Some of the essays in Fraud were featured on the show, and have the indicators of TAL material—immersive experiences, some interviews, all interjected with light, wry humor.

As I read it, though, I was thinking of the essays of David Foster Wallace—the kind of assignment journalism he attempts in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. (I’m thinking of Wallace’s pieces on the Illinois State Fair and the cruise ship excursion, to be specific.) These essays are fun and entertaining reads, but they carry a bit of a haughty, somewhat hostile Gen X attitude, through the lens of someone who can’t believe the people around him are taking themselves seriously and having a good time. It carries the insinuation that we, the reader, would never stoop to participating in such activities ourselves.

The essays in Fraud tackle similar “you had to be there”-style assignments: Rakoff’s time at a New Age retreat center, his attendance at a wilderness & survival school in New Jersey, an orientation session for teachers from Austria for positions in the New York City public school system. Rakoff’s writing is less intentional in its aim, less hostile, a little more sincere and curious, but it often still leaves its subject hanging out to dry while we are supposed to share the author’s perplexity. I have not listened to This American Life in a long while, so maybe I’m wrong in assuming this, but this approach to essay writing strikes me as belonging to an era that has passed—writing with less of a sense of elevation and more about using subjects as marks to showcase wit. Given the shared first names of these three notable examples, I’m inclined to think of this as the David Style.

Rakoff died in 2012 from complications at the very young age of forty-seven. The final essay in Fraud obliquely refers to his diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (I thought of Janet Hobhouse having her ovarian tumor discovered at the end of The Furies.)It’s one of Rakoff’s few personal pieces in the book, though it strives to be about something other than himself.  

Tagged: books, essay, writing