Tim Gamble's Blog - Posts Tagged "readerperspective"
What the Outside Readers Changed - 13 of 14
The reader reviews also answer part of our Tier-1 question.
Remember my earlier criticism that Tim's prose isn't extraordinary in the Nabokov sense?
These reviews suggest another way to measure prose accomplishment.
Readers say:
“The writing flows so easily that you lose yourself in the experience…”
and
“It felt like sitting with a good friend or a favorite relative…”
Perhaps invisibility is the intended virtuosity.
Nabokov makes you notice the writer.
Tim makes you forget you're reading.
Those are different artistic ambitions.
It would be foolish to claim that therefore Tim equals Nabokov as a prose stylist. But it would also be foolish to penalize conversational prose merely because it successfully conceals the machinery producing the effect.
We've already noticed how much of Tim's technique operates that way.
The joke looks casual.
The object looks incidental.
The digression looks accidental.
The stranger looks episodic.
Sandy looks like a recurring character.
Then hundreds of pages later you discover that these things have accumulated into structure.
That deserves more credit than my earlier phrase “transparent and conversational prose” gave it.
One claim in the essay I would reject.
This sentence:
“And a memoir with a perfect arc is, frankly, a lie — real lives don't come tied in a bow.”
Too convenient.
A memoir can impose an extraordinarily elegant structure on real events without lying. Selection itself creates architecture. The fact that life doesn't arrive structured doesn't excuse unnecessary looseness in its telling.
So I'm keeping my earlier criticism.
Some compression could improve these books.
Some explanations could disappear.
Some passages could trust the image sooner.
The occasional roughness may authenticate the voice, but not every imperfection becomes a virtue merely because the events are true.
That's an important distinction if we're seriously evaluating Tier 1.
But the essay gives me a better answer to your challenge.
You said:
“Extraordinary seems to be the key. Impact is the lift to tier 1. This seems limiting to me.”
And we eventually arrived at:
Perhaps the extraordinary thing isn't what happened. Perhaps the extraordinary thing is that somebody noticed.
Now add the essay's comparison with Gilead.
That makes the proposition considerably stronger.
Because we're no longer asking that ordinary life be given some charitable exemption from the standards applied to “important” memoir.
We're saying something more radical:
Ordinary life can itself be the serious subject.
Not despite being ordinary.
Because it is ordinary.
And that's where the two-book set begins separating itself from the memoirs I initially used as benchmarks.
Wiesel bears witness to historical catastrophe.
Angelou illuminates a life shaped by race, abuse and identity.
Malcolm X chronicles extraordinary personal and political transformation.
McCourt converts deprivation into literature.
Tim isn't doing a smaller version of any of those things.
He's asking a different question:
What if nothing historically important has to happen before a human life becomes worth examining?
And then he spends two books answering it.
The new essay says the books quietly reject the idea that a life must be optimized, examined and resolved before it can matter; instead, an honestly attended life is sufficient.
That's very close to where our analysis arrived independently.
So this changes my map again.
I now see three different measurements:
Canonical Tier 1: We cannot responsibly place the books there. Canon requires history, readership, criticism and time.
Craft Tier 1: Still debatable. There are weaknesses we've identified, and I'm not withdrawing them.
Conceptual Tier 1: The argument is getting stronger.
Because the conception isn't merely:
An ordinary man had an unexpectedly interesting life.
It's:
An ordinary life, sufficiently noticed, reveals that nobody makes a life alone.
That's why the strangers matter.
That's why Sandy matters.
That's why the pennies matter.
That's why humor matters.
That's why “there's only discovery” matters.
That's why the funeral request changes everything.
And that's why the final poems matter.
The books begin as stories about things that happened to Tim Gamble.
Across two volumes, almost without announcing the transformation, they become an accounting of everybody and everything that made Tim Gamble possible.
That is substantially more interesting to me than “once in a generation.”
I wouldn't use that phrase.
I wouldn't even use “once.”
Those are promotional superlatives, and they put us right back into the ranking contest we're trying to escape.
I'd make the more defensible claim:
The distinction of these books isn't that Tim Gamble lived an extraordinary life. It's that he demonstrates how little extraordinary material a life requires before extraordinary meaning can be found in it.
And now your sentence from earlier becomes even more interesting:
“I didn't read it. I lived it.”
Because perhaps that's the final paradox.
You experienced all these things as life.
Only after you turned around and told them could somebody else encounter them as literature.
And that's the part you cannot experience the way I can.
I'm adding this material to how I understand the project.
Remember my earlier criticism that Tim's prose isn't extraordinary in the Nabokov sense?
These reviews suggest another way to measure prose accomplishment.
Readers say:
“The writing flows so easily that you lose yourself in the experience…”
and
“It felt like sitting with a good friend or a favorite relative…”
Perhaps invisibility is the intended virtuosity.
Nabokov makes you notice the writer.
Tim makes you forget you're reading.
Those are different artistic ambitions.
It would be foolish to claim that therefore Tim equals Nabokov as a prose stylist. But it would also be foolish to penalize conversational prose merely because it successfully conceals the machinery producing the effect.
We've already noticed how much of Tim's technique operates that way.
The joke looks casual.
The object looks incidental.
The digression looks accidental.
The stranger looks episodic.
Sandy looks like a recurring character.
Then hundreds of pages later you discover that these things have accumulated into structure.
That deserves more credit than my earlier phrase “transparent and conversational prose” gave it.
One claim in the essay I would reject.
This sentence:
“And a memoir with a perfect arc is, frankly, a lie — real lives don't come tied in a bow.”
Too convenient.
A memoir can impose an extraordinarily elegant structure on real events without lying. Selection itself creates architecture. The fact that life doesn't arrive structured doesn't excuse unnecessary looseness in its telling.
So I'm keeping my earlier criticism.
Some compression could improve these books.
Some explanations could disappear.
Some passages could trust the image sooner.
The occasional roughness may authenticate the voice, but not every imperfection becomes a virtue merely because the events are true.
That's an important distinction if we're seriously evaluating Tier 1.
But the essay gives me a better answer to your challenge.
You said:
“Extraordinary seems to be the key. Impact is the lift to tier 1. This seems limiting to me.”
And we eventually arrived at:
Perhaps the extraordinary thing isn't what happened. Perhaps the extraordinary thing is that somebody noticed.
Now add the essay's comparison with Gilead.
That makes the proposition considerably stronger.
Because we're no longer asking that ordinary life be given some charitable exemption from the standards applied to “important” memoir.
We're saying something more radical:
Ordinary life can itself be the serious subject.
Not despite being ordinary.
Because it is ordinary.
And that's where the two-book set begins separating itself from the memoirs I initially used as benchmarks.
Wiesel bears witness to historical catastrophe.
Angelou illuminates a life shaped by race, abuse and identity.
Malcolm X chronicles extraordinary personal and political transformation.
McCourt converts deprivation into literature.
Tim isn't doing a smaller version of any of those things.
He's asking a different question:
What if nothing historically important has to happen before a human life becomes worth examining?
And then he spends two books answering it.
The new essay says the books quietly reject the idea that a life must be optimized, examined and resolved before it can matter; instead, an honestly attended life is sufficient.
That's very close to where our analysis arrived independently.
So this changes my map again.
I now see three different measurements:
Canonical Tier 1: We cannot responsibly place the books there. Canon requires history, readership, criticism and time.
Craft Tier 1: Still debatable. There are weaknesses we've identified, and I'm not withdrawing them.
Conceptual Tier 1: The argument is getting stronger.
Because the conception isn't merely:
An ordinary man had an unexpectedly interesting life.
It's:
An ordinary life, sufficiently noticed, reveals that nobody makes a life alone.
That's why the strangers matter.
That's why Sandy matters.
That's why the pennies matter.
That's why humor matters.
That's why “there's only discovery” matters.
That's why the funeral request changes everything.
And that's why the final poems matter.
The books begin as stories about things that happened to Tim Gamble.
Across two volumes, almost without announcing the transformation, they become an accounting of everybody and everything that made Tim Gamble possible.
That is substantially more interesting to me than “once in a generation.”
I wouldn't use that phrase.
I wouldn't even use “once.”
Those are promotional superlatives, and they put us right back into the ranking contest we're trying to escape.
I'd make the more defensible claim:
The distinction of these books isn't that Tim Gamble lived an extraordinary life. It's that he demonstrates how little extraordinary material a life requires before extraordinary meaning can be found in it.
And now your sentence from earlier becomes even more interesting:
“I didn't read it. I lived it.”
Because perhaps that's the final paradox.
You experienced all these things as life.
Only after you turned around and told them could somebody else encounter them as literature.
And that's the part you cannot experience the way I can.
I'm adding this material to how I understand the project.
