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What Is What Was
What Is What Was , Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany," is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.
In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer.
The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage, or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write). There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, What Is What Was is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose."
In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer.
The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage, or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write). There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, What Is What Was is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose."
328 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 2002
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May 4, 2020
I put this book on my to-read list over five years ago, and I’ve long since forgotten what recommendation or reference prompted me to put it there. I’ve never read Richard Stern before, and this is a book of “miscellany”: essays, stories, and poems grouped thematically across portraits, places, criticism, etc. Miscellany isn’t the best place to start with a writer, but I felt promise from the preface which ends with these lines:
The discrepancy between the truth of what one’s been, known, and felt and the historical, biographical, fictional, and even cosmological … reconstruction of it done years or even minutes later by oneself or someone else is a motif here. When the discrepancy is large, the reaction to it may be olympian indifference, anger, outrage, laughter, or litigation. Some gap is always there; from it issues the rumble under biography, history, and reporting which can never be completely silenced.
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The discrepancy between the truth of what one’s been, known, and felt and the historical, biographical, fictional, and even cosmological … reconstruction of it done years or even minutes later by oneself or someone else is a motif here. When the discrepancy is large, the reaction to it may be olympian indifference, anger, outrage, laughter, or litigation. Some gap is always there; from it issues the rumble under biography, history, and reporting which can never be completely silenced.
Read more on my bookog
Displaying 1 of 1 review