Well-Deserved Praise for Mark Slouka

Nice to see Mark Athitakis putting Mark Slouka’s criminally overlooked essay collection Essays From the Nick of Time in his 10 best of the year list:

9. Essays From the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka

The things Slouka pines for (silence, the humanities) and rails against (increasingly corrupt business and politics) in this essay collection threaten to make him the dean of Get Off My Lawn University. But his patience and intelligence make his arguments feel less like rants and more like reminders of bedrock principles.

I became acquainted with Slouka’s writing in the pages of Harper’s (and several of these essays were first published there). He’s been a consistent writer in a magazine that is very uneven, as it seems that Harper’s for too-often falls for the allures of the stunt-essay that essentially says nothing (and does so in a very self-indulgent way). I see these things so often in Harper’s these days that it’s almost as though the editorial staff longs for the heyday of David Foster Wallace when they’d send him out to an awards banquet and he’d come back with an astounding 800-page document that somehow explained space flight in a hilarious and enormously engaging way that made it applicable to Americn media and society.

But anyway, Mark Slouka doesn’t do that (I mean the stunt essay). In fact, he eschews all the razzle dazzle stunt nonsense and just writes some very thoughtful, very honest and original stuff that has made me think. I’ve really appreciated how in his essays he often approaches the contemporary U.S. by sticking up for the worth of the humanities in a sort of way that makes you feel good for loving great art and literature just because it’s wonderful, instead of feeling dirty and used, as though you’ve just justified the existence to War and Peace to some bean counter who wants to know what it’s good for.

To return to Mark Athitakis’s list, I also liked this sentiment:

That’s not meant to dismiss Lord of Misrule itself, a beautifully written novel that evokes Nelson Algren’s smoky-poker-room prose poems. Indeed, Gordon’s book is a welcome counter to the hefty NBA fiction winners of the past three years: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (overwritten big-city tribute, constantly making symphonic noises about its 9/11-ness while ducking the event itself), Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country (a restitching of previous novels, its prizewinning status largely understood to commemorate the author’s career), and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (a Vietnam epic that constantly wobbled between freewheeling and slovenly). The National Book Foundation and many other prize-giving entities have had occasional spasms of disdain for widescreen books, but let’s ratify it in the bylaws: No plots accepted for which the adjective “sweeping” would be appropriate. Maybe it’s time to say the way-we-live-now novel is suspect, given the atomized, decentralized way we live now.

I confess I write this as somebody burned by the era-encompassing books of 2010 . . .

Incidentally, that “burned by” list includes Freedom, by the way, quite certainly this year’s most overrated mediocrity.

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