(by Danielle Dutton)
In “Writing Advice,” a short piece toward the end of this book that reads like nonfiction until it suddenly doesn’t, one writer tells another to “write something with a real story and get it over two hundred pages” as opposed to “writing little books that nobody reads.” I, for one, quite like Danielle Dutton’s “little books,” and am glad to have read this one, which contains writing in a number of forms—stories, and essays, and a one-act play, and a piece that consists entirely of quotes from other books about dresses. (I really liked that piece—seeing which quotes I recognized or whose provenance I could guess, including one from Samuel Pepys and another from a Sweet Valley High book, seeing the ones that were from books I’d read even though I didn’t remember the quote, seeing the ones from books I’ve been meaning to read, seeing the ones from books or authors I’ve never heard of.) Elsewhere in the book, Dutton’s reference points include artists and authors whose work I enjoy, from Agnès Varda (The Beaches of Agnès is forever in my list of top-five films) to Lydia Davis to Georges Perec to Agnes Martin. This book has big lit-crit energy (which Lucy Ellmann complains about in her NY Times review of this) but that isn’t a negative for me, even though it’s been literally decades since I read anything by Viktor Shklovsky or Mikhail Bakhtin. I like the mood of the book a lot, the way different pieces have strong elements of disorientation or unease, without the book as a whole feeling too queasy or too much of a downer.
Highlights for me: the list of kinds of light in “Installation” (which Deb Olin Unferth quotes part of in her review in The Believer), and the entirety of My Wonderful Description of Flowers, which was originally published in The New Yorker. Oh, and One Woman and Two Great Men, which is about Kant and Thomas de Quincey and Fleur Jaeggy, and made me remember how I enjoyed Jaeggy’s book These Possible Lives and have been meaning to read more by her for ages.
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