As any essayist will tell you, the word essay is roughly rooted in the French word for try. (Montaigne, a pioneer of the form, called his classic book of writings Essais, or “attempts.”) Today, most essayists focus on the optimistic sense of that trying — to write an essay is to give an idea a go, to put something out there, to deliver a take. Ander Monson’s writing, by contrast, derives from the idea that try is a close cousin to fail — that the essay is a place to risk and embrace confusion, that tidiness forecloses insight, that it spoils fun. For instance: There is a small patch of uninhabited land in Michigan called Donken; Monson likes the middling 80s hair-metal act Dokken. The two words share five of six letters; they rhyme pungently. Can they be connected? Even if they can’t — at least not without looking a bit silly — let’s try.
I Will Take the Answer, Monson’s fourth essay collection, is a clutch of cultural studies that on the surface revels in frivolity — in addition to the piece on Donken/Dokken, he writes about (among other things) lawn darts, mix tapes, Renaissance Faire, and a giant inflatable Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer he installs on his lawn every Christmas. But his underlying intentions are serious, born of a belief that the more we keep spelunking through our memories of these artifacts, and their own histories, the closer we’ll get to a truer sense of being. He’s funny, but not a prankster; he’s inspired by Roland Barthes but disinterested in academic scrutiny; he’s a historian but only to the point where he can make history round back to the personal. “Here’s what I believe: the way to talk about I is to talk about world, not (just) to talk about I,” he writes. “I sees world through eye. And what we see and say about the world says a whole lot about ourselves.”
Monson isn’t the first person to argue for the power of the first person to speak for everybody, but he may be more committed to the cause, and more questioning of it, than most essayists. In addition to his own work, he’s a lead editor of the website Essay Daily, which contemplates the form, and cocreator of annual March song tournaments modeled after NCAA’s March Madness brackets, pitting songs from the same genre against each other via companion essays. In the new book, Monson writes about 2016’s “March Sadness,” a tourney of sad pop songs, and the piece covers not just the songs in the competition but a busted friendship, academic research into “the intersections of culture and suffering,” his obsession with the 2011 shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in his native Tucson (a thematic throughline in the book), and the moment where a pop song loses its artifice and reveals raw emotion. “I’m self-conscious about revealing these personal details to you here, but because we’re talking about sad songs, they’re important,” he writes. “They might even be crucial to how we experience these songs and why we keep coming back to painful memories.”
Might be, but who knows? Monson is comfortable with refusing to tie the bow, to draw firm conclusions, to only conclude (if there is a conclusion) that the essay’s greatest virtue is to provide a forum for personal and cultural exploration. It can be easy, without paying close attention, to miss how Monson can get from point A to point Z in a matter of a few paragraphs. An essay on mixtapes moves from a cross-bred tree (“a particular mixtape of a tree”) to an unmarked tape received in the mail to a mysterious light that consumed his imagination in his native Michigan. Zipping between past and present, mystery to mystery, from natural history to cultural artifacts, he’s trying (trying) to assert that our character is often constructed out of these sedimentary layers of thought, experience, and fact — and, more interestingly, that we engage in our culture-making to both express our sense of that being and to bury the past. “The speculation we engage in to get at the roots of those stories and selves now lost to history is memory topworking,” he writes.
Fun as the zipping is, a little bow-tying wouldn’t hurt on occasion; I Will Take the Answer at times reads more like notes toward an essay collection than the finished thing, a statement I suspect he’d take as a compliment. (By way of disclosure, I was an unpaid contributor to the 2018 “March Shredness” tournament; my essay on Queensryche got knocked out of the first round.) A study of a map of Michigan mines opens up the idea of digging as a metaphor for a host of things (family, pollution, obsolescence, etc.), but doesn’t tunnel in any particular direction; the piece on Ren Faire suggests it’s “deeply intertwined with the history of the American counterculture” but doesn’t really consider the point. Without Monson’s quicksilver thoughts providing context, individual assertions look a bit absurd. Catching a ballad by the hair act Cinderella on the radio, he thinks, “that bit of Cinderella somehow playing on the radio seems to me proof of the beyond better than anything else I can think of.” I suppose you had to be there — or, more precisely, be him.
But that’s exactly Monson’s goal — to unsettle the idea of personal remembrance as something fully collective, to map a weird and fuzzy spot where his experience is so absurd that’s it’s singular but not quite so absurd that you can’t relate to it. In his 2010 collection, Vanishing Point, he asserted that he was searching for the “antidote to the pressure I feel of writing nonfiction, of claiming that humans can ever actually present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, on paper, permanently.” A decade on, he’s still at work on the project, and if the subject matter is more abstruse, he charmingly commits to it, and he visualizes it well. A Tucson storm tunnel he visits is a metaphor for our online rabbit holes (“burrowing from link to link to link, spectacle to spectacle”). Lawn darts are stand-ins for our childhood urge to take risks — and the toy’s ban a symbol of our suppression of it. (“Long live skull fracture and bone penetration. Long live instruments of war packaged as a family game.”)
And that giant Rudolph in his yard is a stand-in for every nation that wanted a colossus to assert its power. “To be responsible for a colossus is to fear invasion, to fear its toppling, to fear its becoming ruin,” he writes. “Of course all of this eventually becomes ruin, but our most important job as humans is perhaps to resist ruin.” You probably have your own odd bulwark against the forces that want to wreck you, he means to say. Talk about it, he suggests. The weirder the better. Try to explain it; just try.
[Published by Graywolf Press on February 4, 2020, 248 pp., $16 paperback]