The David Style
March 2, 2025 § Leave a comment
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.
How to Write Posthumously
December 29, 2012 § Leave a comment
At The New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, the transcript of an address by Jeffrey Eugenides delivered to the recipients of the 2012 Whiting Award. By writing posthumously, of course, he means writing without the natural inclination to compromise one’s writing when people start paying too much attention to it. (Hasn’t been a problem for me, so far. But I wholly understand it.)
Your audience, as it grows, your need for a teaching job, the fact of being taken seriously and reviewed by people—all these things might lead you to over-analyze your words and censor them. As Adrienne Rich put it, “Lying is done with words and also with silence.”
…
To die your whole life. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing life. There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. … The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully. Not to be a slave to fashion or commerce, not to succumb to arid self-censorship, not to bow to popular opinion—what is all that but a description of the educated, enlightened life?
Coming shortly after this year’s ALCS, Eugenides repeats the words of a Detroit Tigers pitcher, Doug Fister: “Stay within yourself.” In other words, do not change your game in response to the expectations of an opponent, or the marketplace.
One of my problems is that I keep looking up at the top of the hole, where the daylight is, when I know the only way to get where I want to be is to keep digging.
No Summer Slump This Year
July 15, 2012 § Leave a comment
I wrote a 4,000 word story in about two weeks. I don’t know if it’s any good or even finished (my approach is to forget about it for a while and then come back with fresh eyes), but it has a beginning, middle, and end, and the fact that I was able to write it so fluidly in the middle of summer—there was never any point where I got stuck, I knew what the next scene would be and the voice of the story just took over—is an encouraging sign.
I guess I should thank the Red Sox for being so terrible this year. Consider this your backhanded contribution to one man’s fledgling art.
Neil Serven 