Here's a passage from the latest number of “The Bitch Goddess Review, a Journal of Sour Grapes,” a sarcastic little sheet overseen by my friend Winters, who really ought to get out more. Don’t shoot me, I’m just the excerpter.
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But to return to our vivisection of Barbara Kingsolver.
I have been nose deep in “High Tide in Tucson,” her collection of essays drawn from the trying life of a full-time world-famous author. Novels are Kingsolver's primary sort of literary emission, not essays, but she’s branching out. Because it’s wonderful being an essayist, isn’t it ? Such scope for literary talent, such a précis for living--the essay. The jacket copy assures us these essays show the author at her brilliant best, and how is it we forget that every jacket connected to every book ever published has assured us likewise?
The essays are personal. We hear of Kingsolver’s trials as a mother, of the pain of learning to “multitask,” of the uncertainty with which she performed onstage in a band made up of other famous authors. We learn through her careful scientific process of remembering what she learned in college that some animals dally with non-mates in secret, and so perhaps with humans. In short, we experience with her all she has known of the range of human enterprise, the whole two yards.
To my besotted eye, of course, there appears to be precious little difference between what the book publicity department calls “compelling insights from the small departments of life,” and what the rest of us call grumping.
A certain turned-outwardness characterizes Kingsolver’s writing, a certain share-it-with-you, as if she is tipping her cards to us, but nothing more brilliant than this, so far as I can tell. No gripping enlightenment. No pinky-fresh phrasing. No sounding trumpet.
This is not to disparage her, not in the least. It’s only to try to understand, in so far as we can, why Kingsolver can get away with doing this sort of thing and the rest of us cannot.
Much the same, I’ll be bound, could be said for many of the lady authors that now so ornament the landscape out there. But no. Save that for another time. I like to read a lot of them. Some of them I like a great deal. (Hey, I just stole from Dorothy Parker.) But oftentimes you find yourself delighted with them not so much because they write well as because they can write at all. Yet their names are heaped up high with the celebrity of their work.
As for these essays, without question most of the rest of us could gather words in about the same quality of combination as they exhibit. I could make an essay about my time working in a summer camp, for example. I could turn my everyday morning sequence into an essay, describe my time of rising and my reason for that time, the conditions which have forced such a time upon me. I could speak of my shaving strategy, the vicissitudes of complection. I could bring in references to bugs and other authors. I could speak of the poetry of the soap dish, and how the peculiar pattern of mildew in my tub takes me by allusion back to my first boyish love of Christ. For a concluding insight I could make the flushing toilet into a metaphor for the fresh start of the day.
But in the first place it’d never fly with anyone; I would get no book jackets praising my brilliance. And in the second place I’d have to bore myself to a state of material disintegration to get all the way through it.
Sour grapes here? Very many of them, yes. But also my own little attempt at insight; something along the lines of this: If this stuff gets taken seriously, and this is the kind of stuff most of us turn out just warming up, maybe we should have a higher opinion of ourselves. Maybe we should stop looking, even just a moment, for the felicitous, the keen, the crackling, to come out of our efforts, and aim instead for the merely competent. Maybe it’s time to lower our standards.
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